MakerBot Industries

This man is the 27th coolest tech person in New York City | Photo Credit: Joi Ito

Bre Pettis made Business Insider’s Silicon Alley 100, an annual list of “100 people in the New York tech community who did really cool stuff this year.” He is #27.

We’ve always known he was special, but now his specialness is quantified and packaged by a leading online business magazine.

“It’s all because of Makerbots,” said Bre, who also said he thought he was something like #99 last year. In fact, he was #52. Indeed, his position on the list is undeniably tied to MakerBot Industries and his role in the DIY 3D printing revolution. His movement up the list from last year can be attributed to a great year for the business.

Tonight he will be hanging out with the likes of Mayor Bloomberg, Kickstarter founder Perry Chen (#18), Gawker founder Nick Denton (#9), and Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai (#1).

Congratulations, Bre!

We’ve used a 37mm motor from Kysan motors from the beginning. It’s a 2RPM Motor that has a lot of torque. There is nothing like it out there for brute torque at this price point. We sell it for $20 in our store. They do wear out. My first motor died after about 6 months because it was a MK3 and was getting pushed and eventually the driveshaft bent away from the internal gears and it just stopped. I was doing a public demo a the time and I just switched out the motor and was back in action in minutes. I’ve been using the replacement motor for that one ever since. MakerBots are cutting edge inexpensive 3D printing machines and they occasionally need maintenance and tuning and love. We keep working hard to make them easier to put together, easier to use, and easier to fix.

Because it’s a kit that you put together yourself, there is no warranty on it, but we will replace parts that arrive DOA. Recently we received some complaints about the motors and so we’ve started testing every motor that leaves the building. You can see our testing rig in the photo above. Out of the 455 we have tested in the past 3 weeks, 1 was DOA. With almost 2500 MakerBots in the wild, we’ve had 11 motors in total returned for being DOA. Considering that this is a cheap and rather complicated motor, that is a pretty good statistic and now that we’ve put testing in place, we won’t have any leave the botcave non-functional.

There are some people who have had some problems that we’ve had a hard time replicating and we’re still doing testing to figure out if the problems we hear about are related to ghosts in the firmware, software, hardware or the power supply. If you have a problem, don’t hesitate to drop us a note on the contact page and we’ll do our best to help out!

Robot talks!

With the Botacon approaching on December 11, 2010, we’re looking to line up some speakers and to spur some interesting discussions.

Who do you want to see at Botacon?  A famous robot scientist?  MakerBot owners?  Your favorite amateur robot scientist?  Your high school science teacher?  A robot artist?  An artist who uses robots?

Leave a comment and drop a few names and we’ll see what we can do about getting them there!