MakerBot Industries

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!