MakerBot Industries

Here’s are video from the early days of RepRap experimentation in 2007! Science!

Elijah Wood decided he wanted a RepRap, but you need a RepRap to make a RepRap so he made a RepStrap RepRap! Then he made a really nice site to document it all. Check it!

When I first met Zach Smith in the summer of 2007, I asked him what he made and he replied that he was working on robots that make robots and I remember saying something to the effect of “Count me in!” and I would go meet him in his very small little workshop that was on the catwalk of a video studio in Williamsburg. We were working on a machine to make machines that could make machines. We made a few videos together about it and then the rest is inevitable history.

Elijah says,

I started this whole RepRap project about a month ago. I got hooked on RepRap right when I saw the Make podcast that Bre Pettis did. I thought I could probably build my own for cheaper and maybe customize it better than I could from a kit. So, I set out to design a RepStrap with parts that I had lying around my house. I built my base out of PVC pipe (which I have tons of) and some basic steel pluming parts (the part that hooks the PVC into the back of the Z axis). I made the X and Y axis frame out of aluminum angle iron. I actually almost copied the McWire CNC design on Instructables Other than the Instructables design, I had to do a lot of research on the axis. I was curious what other RepStrappers were doing. I was deciding for days whether to use the threaded rod drive system or the belt drive. I eventually went for the threaded rod design because I had most of the materials I needed already and because in the podcast Bre used that method. For the electronics, I used the generation 2 Arduino equipment. I used this because I was already familiar with the Arduino way of coding. Some problems I faced were that there are so many versions of code out there so I had to try many different versions and eventually I had to ask on the forums for the correct firmware. Another problem was that the stepper drivers V1.2 kept frying. I’m not really sure why, but I would recommend either getting the newer version V2.3 or buy 1 extra just in case. Other than this, there were no more problems and after some time I did get everything working fine. The total price I paid for the whole thing was about $300. Compared to other designs mine is very crude, but for the price it gets the job done.

Seeing this machine takes me back to a time at the roots of MakerBot and trying to figure out how to make a cheap and accessible 3D printer by strolling the aisles of hardware stores! We still do that!