MakerBot Industries

Kyle and Adrian are two architecture graduate students at Pratt who dropped by the store yesterday to get some help on their CupCake CNC as well as some help soldering their relay board at our soldering station.

They also bought five pounds of natural ABS for printing building models to show their clients.

Building derivative Things from Thingiverse is all about building up and off of someone else’s ideas. Little proofs of concept like printed ball bearings turn hardware dependent plastic spindles into designs for totally printed plastic spindles.

The above video is from a YouTube user named tapiocasunshine demonstrating a printed plastic spring to some slightly trippy music. A spring like this would probably make a decent shock absorber or handy low power spring to help with the magazine clip for a certain Open Source Disc Shooter.

tapiocasunshine, if you see this, would you share these designs on Thingiverse?

Dirk van der Kooij prints chairs using a CNC extruder arm with a hopper for large ground up plastic from refrigerators. The extrusion appears to be about finger thick, which enables low resolution and high speed printing. I suspect its print volume is probably on par with the 35.5 cubic feet promised by Le BigRep.

Endless.

One plastic string, made out of old refrigerators, crafted by a robot, into a chair.

When the first plastic chairs were made, they began with fairly simple tools and moulds to form the plastic. The simple tools were easy to adjust and this gave the designer the chance to evaluate the final product and adjust the tools almost endlessly.

As labour grew more and more expensive, it was filtered out of the process with automated and complicated tools.

These automated processes have been very inflexible until now. High investments in complicated moulds made it almost impossible for a designer to evaluate and refine his final object.

The designer is no longer involved in the production process and the design stage is completely shifted to a pre production phase.

As Dirk van der Kooij considered this a lost chance he made a pact with the devil, because he found a solution, not in labour but in computerization.

By combining different techniques, he was able to design an automated but very flexible process. He taught a robot his new craft, drawing furniture out of one endlessly long plastic string.

This opened the possibility for Dirk van der Kooij to design in the good old-fashioned way, making a chair, evaluating, refining, making a chair, evaluating, refining and making a chair. Or developing an infinitely large collection of variations.  Endless.

What would you print if time, size, and scale were no longer limitations?
(Thanks to Andrew for spotting the Make article!)

MakerBot has opened a small popup retail space at our headquarters in Brooklyn.

87 3rd Ave, Brooklyn between Dean & Bergen (Closest Subway: Atlantic Pacific 2/3/4/5/D/N/R/Q)

We’re open Tuesday-Saturday 12-8pm now until December 24th.

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For sale:

MakerBot Kits: MakerBot Cupcake CNC Kits, Sanguinos, TTL Cables, LED strips, pen plotters, extruders, filament spindle boxes, scanner kits, and ABS plastic in all colors.

Adafruit Kits: USBtiny, Minty Boosts, Motor Shields, Drawdios, TV-B-Gones, Wave Shields and Brain Machine kits!

Evil Mad Science: LED Menoras, Diavolinos, Larson Scanners, Meggy Jr. RGB Game kits, and Bulbdial clock kits.

Arduino: Besides the Sanguino and Diavolino, which are both Arduino variants, we’ve got Arduinos Megas in stock!

Jimmy Rodgers: LOL Shields and Open Heart kits.

W&L: Video Game Shield

Sparkfun: ClockIt, Metro-Gnome, Multimeter Kit, Simon, Through-Hole Christmas Tree and Audio Amplifier kits.