MakerBot Industries

Adam, George (wearing the torzle) and Charles Pax at Maker Faire

What a weekend! It was incredible to meet so many creative people at Maker Faire. Veteran MakerBot operators and those who had never seen an at-home 3D printing machine cycled through the MakerBot tent relentlessly for two full days. It was non-stop Botfarm action all weekend with a record sixteen MakerBots printing, drawing, and even making music at our tent, and about five next door at the 3D printing village – including a MakerBot Frostruder printing delicious liquid sweets such as Nutella onto bread.

On Saturday we caught up with George Hart, an engineer/educator/computer scientist/sculptor/mathematical magician and designer of the pieces used to make what he calls a “torzle.” Art historian Bret Rothstein saw the 16th century original at the Schloss Ambras Musuem in Austria. He took a picture and sent it to George, asking, “What the heck is this?”

George made a 3D model of the torus – which is made out of 75 identical interlocking components – on his computer. He and Bret made reproductions out of wood and nylon, and captured the attention of Boing Boing. It wasn’t long before the torzle made its way to Thingiverse, thanks to Adam. Charles Pax printed it out with a MakerBot soon after. The torzle has since been living at the Botcave, but Adam and Charles thought it only fitting to gift it to George when they saw him at Maker Faire.

This twisted torus is the perfect item to print out using your new MakerBot Automated Build Platform or with the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, since you can hit “Print” and kick back while it spits out part after part after part.

George has since found out that the Danish called the torzle a “Gærkrans,” and used it for storing yeast to make beer.

Nick Starno did some math here at the Botcave:

A very common question I hear is the cost of material, and how much a 5lb reel of plastic will actually make. Here is an interesting perspective of how to envision it. Based on our current MK5 setup (MK5 drive gear + MK5 hot end), and assuming a stock 0.5mm nozzle, the DC motor running at 2RPM with a 3mm filament, and specific weight of ABS being 0.00104 g/mm^3]:

- It takes almost exactly 2min to extrude 1 gram of ABS.
453grams/pound means

- it takes over 15 hours of continuous extrusion to go through 1 lb. of ABS
and

- it takes over 75 hours (3+ days) of continuous extrusion to go through 5 lbs. of ABS

At some point we’ll print out an entire 5 pound roll. Needless to say, that’s a lot of printed things!

As in a 20 minutes of video tutorials.  MakerBot’s summer engineer and the creator of the Makerbot 3D Scanner v1.0 Kit, Taylor Goodman, has put together another great video explaining how to turn a point cloud into a mesh using Blender (11:37) and another video on how to turn a mesh into a 3D printable object, also using Blender (8:43). ¹  Tyler has also incorporated these instructions into his “Blender Tips” page on the MakerBot wiki.

Cloud to Mesh with Blender

Mesh to 3D object with Blender

1. I know when clothbot watches that video, he will wish it were just two minutes longer… [↩]

PENG Podcast #11 – Makerbot Finetuning from PENG Mainz on Vimeo.

Check out this very well made video that the peng crew sent in! I love the oohs and aaaahs from the crew as the machine shows signs of life!

Der auf der Vollversammlung beschlossene Kauf eines Makerbots ist hiermit abgeschlossen und gekauftes Gerät zusammengebaut und bereit zum Druck von Dingen. Während wir weiter feintunen, seid ihr eingeladen mitzumachen: Mehr Infos unter pengland.de/​makerbot und wenn ihr etwas Drucken wollt, wendet Euch vertrauensvoll an makerbot@pengland.de

Thanks peng friends!

MakerBot’s summer engineer and the creator of the MakerBot 3D Scanner, Taylor Goodman, has put together a video explaining how to download, setup, and install all the software necessary to get your Makerbot 3D Scanner running.  Taylor has also updated the MakerBot wiki to include this information for those of you who are into the whole “reading” thing.

Learn!  Scan!  Duplicate!