MakerBot Industries

We are pleased to announce another step forward for the MakerBot personal manufacturing system, our redesigned MK6 Thermal Core, Cartridge heater, and Safety Cutoff Switch! The StepStruder™ MK6 Plus now ships with the upgraded Heater kit shown, and Thing-O-Matic owners with the MK5 Plastruder and StepStruder with 5ohm Resistors can upgrade easily! Thing-O-Matic orders shipped after 4/14 will receive this upgrade.

All the new heater parts are compatible with the standard MK5 Plastruder mounting hardware, nozzles, and electronics. CupCake CNC owners with a MK5 or MK6 can upgrade too! The new cartridge heaters and Aluminum Thermal core heat up and cool down much faster, making for less time waiting for your Bot to come up to temperature. The new internal position of the cartridge heater inside the Aluminum Thermal Core improves heat transmission to the filament, which makes extruding smoother. It’s another incremental improvement to your Bot specially designed to improve your experience with 3mm and 1.75mm filament and the new MK6 Nozzles. Check it out!

Mk6 Plus Heater Upgrade<-- The complete set of upgrade items!
MakerBot Safety Cutoff Switch
MK6 Plus Safety Cutoff Thermostat
Mk6 Plus Aluminum Thermal Core
Mk6 Plus Cartridge Heater

Four of our classic plastics now available on Spools!

Natural ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament
Green ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament
Black ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament
Black ABS 1kg Spool 1.75mm Filament

More Spool Plastics in the Store!

Printable Clock, Parametric Proof of Concept by syvwlch

Syvwlch has been busy at work on his printable clock over the last week.  He’s produced SEVEN iterations of this design so far.  I’m a huge advocate for posting unfinished or even obsolete designs – the is a perfect example of the benefits.  At any point someone could have jumped in to help out with these designs, the formulas, or contributed code.

Following the evolution of his designs as been very educational for me.  I’ve struggled with how best to design a multi-part mechanical device.  Syvwlch clearly has the right idea – starting with the centermost component – the escapement mechanism – and building outwards upon it.

Printable Clock, Parametric Proof of Concept by syvwlch

Another proof of concept along the way to a WORKING printable clock. A working clock would, for example, have a case. :-) Aside from such petty concerns, this clock is complete, in that we have a power source (a drum to wind a string and weight), a whole gear train (5/3/2/2/5/3/2/2), a Graham escapement, a (token) pendulum and three hands mounted on concentric shafts to show the time. It is fully parametric, animate-able, and about as modular as I could make it within the current constraints of OpenSCAD (recursion would be nice for the eight gears in the gear train!). The code uses three different types of gear wheels, each able to support any level of nested concentric shafts if needed for support or to run clock hands: 1. A drum with an outer gear along one rim, 2. A pinion wheel with a gear supporting a smaller gear, 3. An escapement wheel supporting a smaller gear. It also automatically positions them relative to each other, ensures that they mesh properly and rotates them according to the correct gear ratios to support animation and to check the design. It uses the involute gear script from the MCAD library, and my own escapement library. I intend to move as much of the script into another library at some later date, and like in some of my previous scripts, to provide both the current assembled() module and a handy laidOutToPrint() module. Lastly, the modular nature of this PoC should allow for separate tweaking of the various components of the clock until they all work, without having to print an entire clock every time. (EDIT: fixed a bug, kindly pointed out by DaveD, and uploaded a fixed version of the OpenSCAD script, along with an exploded version of the STL and a JPEG of same.)

This thing brought to you by

Neil over at Traintalk.tv recently got his hands on a Thing-O-Matic kit, with the idea that he’ll use the ‘bot to print out small, detailed objects for his model railroads.  As you can see, he’s off to a good start, but he’s going to need some help getting awesome 3d models to spruce up the old HO-scale down in the basement.

He also had his new Thing-O-Matic at Supertrain (Canada’s largest model train show) in Calgary this last weekend, so I’d guess he just tuned in a few train folks to 3d printing.  I’m hoping that we start seeing a few more train-related items over at Thingiverse!

The MakerBot section starts at about 3:22, but Neil is visiting a cool train museum in the first half of the show, and I suggest that you check it out if you’ve got any tendency towards trainspotting. Spoiler: there is a really cool postal car.