MakerBot Industries

Last week I gave a presentation and demo of a MakerBot and I spent a few hours just doing snowflake prints over and over and tweeking the settings in Skeinforge until I got the optimum settings set up for this snowflake on that machine. For those that don’t have a MakerBot, Skeinforge is a program that slices an object and there are a lot of parameters, like infill and layer height and extrusion speed, to mess with in the battle to make a perfect print.

If you haven’t done lots of multiple prints with 1 Skeinforge change in between prints, I recommend it as a great way to mess about with skeinforge. The cool thing about the snowflake is that it prints in 3-9 minutes depending on infill and so it’s fast and that makes it easy to iterate. Also it skeinforges in just a minute or so, which makes for quick iteration as well. With such a quick turnaround that also means that I only change one parameter at a time since I know It will only take a few minutes. In the past I’ve just gone in and been like “I’ll change them all!” thinking that if it doesn’t work now, that changing more settings would help. (It doesn’t)

In retrospect I wish I’d documented the things that I’d changed as I did it, since now I have good settings but I’ve forgotten everything.

And so I present to you: Skeinforge Battle!!!! A Skeinforge Battle!!!!is when you print something out on your MakerBot and then change 1 setting and print it again. Take pictures of both objects and upload your pics to the MakerBot Flickr Group at and tag them “skeinforgebattle” to document the change. Can you resist the temptation to change all the skeinforge settings? Do you have what it takes to face skeinforge and only change 1 parameter, reprint an object and share pictures?

I’ll do this next time I do prints, but don’t wait for me. Go forth and battle with skeinforge! (And don’t forget the documenting part!) Skeinforge Battle!!!!