MakerBot Industries

I hung out with Mary at Maker Faire last weekend and he’s emphasized how awesome it is to have a MakerBot in your life to just make anything that needs fixing. Broken things that you can fix with a MakerBot in the house means that someone gets to be a superhero. Daryll fixed his dishwasher with a MakerBotted part. Awesome!

[Daryll Strauss'] dishwasher had some problems that he traced to a worn out part on the upper spinning arm. The hackerspace he belongs to has a Makerbot and he though this would be the perfect opportunity to print his own replacement part. He picked up some inexpensive digital calipers and set to work mapping out the dimensions of the broken piece. He took his hand-drawn cross section and built a replica part in Blender. Once he had it just right he generated the g-code and printed the part. His replacement works very well, and it’s a bit thicker (by design) than the original so hopefully that means it will hold up longer.

via Using Makerbot for dishwasher repair – Hack a Day.

The gang over at POPSCI have made a MakerBot. Awesome!

It sounds like the promise of an ad in the back of a PopSci issue from the 1950s. Build your own replicating machine! Make anything you desire in your own garage! But that’s exactly what veteran hacker Bre Pettis and his pals offer with their CupCake CNC kit: a computer-controlled 3-D printer that can whip up almost any object of less than four inches on a side from two kinds of plastic. The company’s goal is to make home manufacturing cheap and common.

They mention that it’s hard to use the software. I wish they’d had the latest version of ReplicatorG when they did the article. Printing has become a lot easier since then!

I had a chance to go back and forth with John Carnett who put it together and not onlly is he an awesome photographer, he’s a totally legit tinkerer who’s done some cool stuff!

via Making the Makerbot, A DIY 3-D Printer | Popular Science.