MakerBot Industries

PLA jam!!!

My MK4 Plastruder is made of entirely stock parts, except for a printed insulator retainer, and worked great with ABS.  My first attempts with PLA about six months ago were alternately wondrous and horrific.  While trying to dial in the proper temperatures for my Plastruder for use with PLA I cranked it too high, the PLA tried to expand inside the insulator retainer, and liquid PLA was forced around the threads of the extruder barrel.  As I said, it was a horrific mess.

How horrific you ask?  Just take a look at this picture of my MK4 plastruder after I tried to extrude PLA:

BLOCKED

Yeah.  It was that bad.  Well, this weekend I gave PLA another shot with my MK5 Plastruder.  At one point I realized I was trying to print while still using the ABS profiles – and heating the PLA up to 230 degrees Celsius.  This was also happening while I left the area to put my daughter to bed.  The result was the extruder was operating way way too hot for way way too long.  These are not good things.

The result is the extruder kept the heat at 230 degrees Celsius, the PLA formed a blockage, and extruder motor kept forcing new PLA down into the extruder barrel.  However, due to the way in which the MK5 is designed, there was no place for the PLA to create a mess.

When I realized what was going on I shut down the extruder and pulled out the filament, pictured at the top of this post.  What you’ll notice is the area of the filament to the right is still clear/translucent while the filament to the left, which was down inside the extruder barrel, is a milky color.  Interestingly, the clear area of filament is still just as flexible as a normal piece of filament while the milky white section is extremely rigid.

This situation, running the extruder too hot for too long, would have been catastrophic for my MK4 plastruder and was basically shrugged off by my MK5.  All I had to do was loosen the thumbscrew for the Delrin plug, yank out the filament and blockage, cut that section out, shove newly cut piece of filament back in, and tighten the thumbscrew again.  This was the difference between a 30 second fix with my MK5 as compared to a problem that actually ruined my MK4 insulating barrier and kept me from printing until I got a replacement.

I’m still dialing in my temperature settings for PLA and will be posting some of my results later today.

Mark de Vinck's cat Chester helps install the X and Y stage

Did you just get your Cupcake CNC in the mail? Is it sitting in your living room, unopened, waiting for your attention? Are you a little nervous about opening it and putting it together?

Have no fear, Make Magazine is here! Mark de Vinck has completed his 13-part series on how to MakerBot. Comments and questions are encouraged and welcomed!

• Part 1: Introduction & background
• Part 2: Unboxing
• Part 3: Electronics
• Part 4: Update & burning the bootloaders
• Part 5: Pulley & enclosure finishing
• Part 6: Building the enclosure
• Part 7: Building the Y-stage and adjusting the Z-stage
• Part 8: Building the X stage
• Part 9: Installing the X & Y stages
• Part 10: Building and installing the Z stage
• Part 11: Building the plastruder & testing
• Part 12: Installing the electronics & software
• Part 13: First print!

Thanks for this excellent series, Mark! All we need now is a how-to on the Thing-o-matic…

MakerBot PLA is BACK! PLA is Polylactic Acid and it’s a MakerBottable plastic that is made from corn. When you make things with it, it smells like waffles! It’s a green plastic that is biodegradable. It’s clear and just begging you to embed LEDs in it. It also doesn’t shrink so it doesn’t have the curling issues that ABS has. The downside is that it is more “melty” than ABS and doesn’t handle overhangs as well as ABS does.

This PLA has been extruded to our specifications and works great with the MakerBot MK5 Plastruder.

Get MakerBot PLA 5 pound coils and MakerBot PLA 1 pound coils in the MakerBot store!

This news is HUGE for the DIY 3D printer community! We’ve been wanting to use PLA as a support material forever but we didn’t know how to dissolve it after. Domonoky and BonsaiBrain of iFeelbeta have cracked the nut and with their solution, you can dissolve PLA! Keep in mind that these are dangerous chemicals, it is serious enough that this chemical soup can be used as drain cleaner once diluted! If you are going to explore dissolving PLA, you may want to get some MakerBot PLA in the MakerBot store!

Be warned that the following chemicals are all dangerous, so handle them with care and with the proper safety precautions!

* Propan-2-ol

* Potassium hydroxide

* Aluminium hydroxide

We used technical propan-2-ol (98%) but you can also use pure propan-2-ol, 8.3% Potassium hydroxide (w/w) and a small catalytical amout (<1%) of Aluminium hydroxide.

A short manual how to prepare the “BetaSolution”:

For preparing the solution we gently warmed up the technical propan-2-ol in a waterbath to a temperature of about 40-50 °C. Be sure, the flask containing the propanol is not completely closed because of the rising vapour pressure. We used a flask made of glass with a perforated cap to prevent condensation of water and evaporation of propan-2-ol. After this, we took the flask out of the waterbath, dryed it from the outside, removed the cap and put the Potassiumhydroxide into it in small quantities. After each portion we stirred. The last little portion consists of about 0.5 g aluminum hydroxide which should also dissolve.

The solvatation of potassium hydroxide and aluminum hydroxide in propan-2-ol needs time. You generate a saturated solution, so don’t wonder, if it gets cloudy after cooling or takes much time to dissolve completely.

Store the resulting solution safely, out of reach of children in a glass container at a dry and cool place. If you use a plastic flask it might deform or the solution will react in another way with the flask.

For use, pour a small amount into a glass, so that your object is completely submerged in the solution, and wait for the PLA to be dissolved. Please only do this in a well ventilated area or outside, because the solution will give of flammable fumes. Dont smoke while doing this !

If you want to speed up the dissolving process, you can warm the solution with a water bath (NO open fire), and stir it with a ultrasonic cleanser or manually with a spoon. This will greatly improve the speed of the dissolving.

Please wear gloves and glasses when handling the warmed solution. It is as aggressive as drain-cleanser!

After dissolving the PLA you should wash your 3D-model with much water. We recommend to put it into another flask containing pure water and let it stand there for another hour. After this, you can dry it on air or with a hair blower.

The solution shouldn’t be disposed into drain without dilution! Let it cool to room temperature, if warmed, and gently put small quantities into a 5 times bigger amount of water. Now you can easily use it as drain-cleanser!

For added information, you can download a safety datasheet we preprared from here

Also we are now opening an onlineshop, www.2printbeta.de, where we plan to sell this solution and other reprap related parts after we get the neccessary permits from the government. So if you are in europe, stay tuned to get the BetaSolution directly from the inventors.

When releasing in december, we also provide a more detailed german and english manual how to use BetaSolution.

To the DIY community:

Have fun with the developement of a smart software to create suitable support structures! Have even more fun with printing and dissolving the generated two-component-objects to obtain a clean ABS structure with overhangs and bridges as much as you want!

Again, big ups and mad props to iFeel beta. They put hard work into discovering and developing it! When they launch their shop, buy the solution from them!

At the “IF … Innovation Festival Kortrijk” Dries Verbruggen demonstrated his virtual pottery wheel¹ and what appears to be a RepRap Darwin² with a clay extruder to create physical models of virtually designed pots.  This video is just so brilliant!

Designguide.tv interview from Unfold on Vimeo.

Besides the super awesome Minority Report style virtual display design interface which puts Sketchup to shame, I love that the pottery wheel is basically a perfect analogy for the design “limitations” of a MakerBot.  (I say limitations because it turns out the “45 degree rule” is more of what you call “guidelines”)³

Sometimes when people send me design files to print they contain overhangs that are totally unprintable without a support structures.  For someone who hasn’t actually used a MakerBot-style 3D printer it takes a few tries to really “get” how it forms models.

Verbruggen’s virtual pottery wheel appears to strictly apply to the “virtual clay” whatever impression you make upon it – allowing you to make pots that aren’t printable.⁴  However, there’s no reason why the virtual display couldn’t make use of a simple physics engine to have unsupported clay structures fall – just as real clay would on a real pottery wheel.  I have a feeling interacting with the object as it is being formed and receiving immediate feedback if there’s a structural defect is the kind of thing people would just “get” intuitively.

1. It appears to use a green laser as a 3D scanner to detect the position of your hand and apply an equivalent force on the virtual clay. [↩]
2. The Godfather of the MakerBot [↩]
3. Thank you Captain Barbosa! [↩]
4. You can see several such models projected on the wall behind him. [↩]

I love this project. Who wouldn’t want to be able to just draw 3D models in the air with an LED?

Is it possible to let a first sketch become an object, to design directly onto space? The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialise free hand sketches. They make it possible by using a unique method where two advanced techniques are combined. Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.

I wish the code could be open and have a wonderful UI so that even kids could make really cool digital designs and print them on their MakerBot. This project seems like it would be really fun to code up for someone who is interested in working with open frameworks. Are you that person? Go for it and share! On a Makerbot scale, I think there would have to be some way to choose how “thick” your drawing lines are in the post-drawing process. I gotta give it to Front. They did this in 2007. Super awesome!

via Front » Projects.

Hitchcock cookie cutters by Matt Griffin

You have until 11:11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time tonight to get your Halloween designs up on Thingiverse for an opportunity to get some free glow-in-the-dark ABS!

Get in the spirit of the season and design something spooky to 3D print on your MakerBot. Check out the spooky Hitchockian designs by our own Matt Griffin. And, no, he’s not eligible to get any free glow-in-the-dark plastic, but we appreciate his contribution!

The Halloween design challenge champion will be announced later this week. Stay tuned and thanks to everyone who has uploaded something to help us get in the mood for H-A-LL-O-W-EE-N with our 3D printers.

Well, there's your problem...

Quick, name just one company that care enough about its users that it is willing to create a firmware/software fix to save you from having to buy a new or replacement part.

Drawing a blank?  Here’s a hint – their name rhymes with SchmakerBot Industries.  The latest version of ReplicatorG, version 0020, provides a way to remap the terminals.  If you’ve blown out an H-Bridge¹ you don’t have to go through the hassle of finding a new chip, desoldering the old one, resoldering the new one in, and troubleshoot it all.  There are probably at least half a dozen 3D printers out there right now with this exact problem keeping them from cranking out all sorts of cool things – their operators wistfully looking at Thingiverse each evening before drifting off to sleep.

Well!  Sleep no longer!  There is printing to be done!  Things to be made!  ReplicatorG 0020 is here to rescue you from your unproductive and restful slumber!

1. I call them fiddly bits. [↩]

Super hot off the wires today is truly one of the most awesome things ever, a 3D printer made of Legos that prints things…. with Legos!

http://www.battlebricks.com/makerlegobot/

How many bots could you build if you were building bots in Belgium?

On October 9 – 10, 2010 Timelab.org and Wim Vandeputte¹ ran a MakerBot build weekend at the “IF … Innovation Festival Kortrijk” during the “Yes! We’re Open” expo by Thomas Lommee in Kortrijk, Belgium.  Lots people registered and showed up to assemble MakerBots during this two-day festival.  By the end of the weekend they had 11 fully operational MakerBots!

Bart Grimonprez and several design students from the HoWest design group cut a transparent amber acrylic case.  Lieven Standaert modified the MakerBot Cupcake designs to work with 5 mm plywood, which is easier to obtain in Belgium. ²

One of the winners of the MakerBot Teacher Giveaway³ Walter Janssens from the Karel de Grote-Hogeschool assembled a MakerBot from scratch with the help of a large group to give him a head start for when his ‘bot arrives.

1. Seen here standing next to his MakerBot, “Pinky” [↩]
2. They promise the design files will be up on Thingiverse once it’s up and running! [↩]
3. We gave away MakerBots, not teachers [↩]