MakerBot Industries

Nose to the Grinding Wheel

Many of our MakerBot users aren’t aware of all the hard work that goes in to producing a CupCake CNC. This is Part I of The Unsung Heros of the 3D Printing Revolution Miniseries. In this Miniseries, we will explore some of the processes that transform raw materials into your CupCakes, right here in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

CupCake’s aren’t all electronics and motors. We put a lot of hard work and elbow grease into making your robot. In this photo we see Widget, MakerBot Employee #2, preparing Z-Rods for the batch 11 shipment of your CupCakes. The Z-rod controls the height of the plastruder head during printing operations and four rods are required per CupCake. Widget carefully shapes each rod by hand, taking care afterward to inspect each one according to our rigid quality standards. Each rod is then carefully packaged, sealed and labeled. This is just one of the hundreds of labor-intensive processes we take to ship your bots.

In the next part of our Miniseries, The Unsung Hero’s of the 3D Printing Revolution, we will take a look at the people who assemble and build your CupCake CNC’s.

OMG.  Gorgeous.  3D scanning is awesome.

Make: Online : Laser-mapped subterranean passages.

Have you ever been in the situation where you’re printing the most amazing object that you downloaded from Thingiverse and the plastruder fails you? You know you’re going to have to rebuild it and it might take you a week to find the half hour it’s going to take to fix it and it’s very frustrating.

Instead of shaking your fist in the air, you can get a spare parts kit and assemble a heater barrel assembly on hand and swap it in if there are any problems.

Besides the heater barrel assembly, the MakerBot Spare Parts Kit includes an extra plastruder pulley and enough nichrome for 3 heater barrels so when you rebuild your first one and build your spare, you’ve still got enough for one more rebuild. Over time these wear down and installing a fresh one can really breathe some life back into your MakerBot. Oh and there is an insulator retainer and idler wheel so you can just slap those in if they break!

Here’s the complete list.

• 1 Extruder Pulley
• 1 Mk4 insulator retainer
• 1 Mk4 Idler wheel
• 3 100k Thermistor
• 1 Mk4 Retainer Washer
• 2 Zip ties
• 2 M3 50mm bolts
• 4 M3 nuts
• 4 M3 washers
• 1 Mk4 Heater barrel
• 1 Mk4 nozzle
• 1 Mk3 thermal barrier (PTFE)
• 2 M5 nuts
• 2 M5 14mm bolts
• 3 feet of nichrome wire. (enough for 3 re-wraps)
• 1 M6 nut
• 5 crimp on connectors
• 6 inches of thermal tape

That’s a lot of awesomeness in a small kit! Get your MakerBot Spare Parts Kit today!