RoboSavvy‘s live-streaming of the assembly of a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic continues tomorrow at 10AM GMT. (That’s 5 AM for those of us in New York.)

If you’d like to have a look, point your browser to: http://makerbotassembly.dyndns.org/

Also, you can follow along reports of their progress, with tips and tricks from experienced Thing-O-Matic builders, here on their forums.

From Pedro @ RoboSavvy:

Tomorrow is the most exciting day as everything will come together and you’ll get a fully functional machine. The tasks for tomorrow are:
- Main body Assembly (ie putting all the axis, extruder, etc together inside the body)
- Electronics Assembly and connections
Tune in tomorrow for the LIVE streaming and some more news.

Whether you have already built your bot or you still haven’t purchased one yet, watching another team put together a Thing-O-Matic can be great way to learn pro tips about the kits. I regularly try to catch time lapse build videos and live builds to see what other folks are trying — and to grab hints to share back with other MakerBot Operators.

The beetle sand mould by sandy3d

This seems to be the very first sand mold on Thingiverse. ¹  The amazing thing about Thingiverse is that nearly three years after it’s creation people are still coming up with totally brand new things to design and upload.  Once a totally new (and open source!) design is uploaded, variations and improvements inevitably start popping up.

Why not a sand mold Mini Cooper, Lamborghini, or Ford Shelby?  With a little OpenSCAD magic, it might take very long to create your own mold from almost anything on Thingiverse.  For your OpenSCAD enjoyment, here’s how to make a similar style sand mold out of nearly any STL on Thingiverse:

• difference()
• {
• scale(1.5) import_stl(“gangsta_fixed.stl”);
• import_stl(“gangsta_fixed.stl”);
• }

How else could you make molds using existing STL’s from Thingiverse?  And, more importantly, what would you use those molds for?

Error - could not find Thing 8980.

1. If I’m wrong, please let me know! [↩]

TARDIS and mini-TARDIS

Everything about this makes me happy. ¹²  Tony Buser printed the same object³ twice, fixed a hardware issue in between, printed it again in a scaled down form, and got a much better print result the second time.  In his words:

Now that I fixed the ripple problem. Unfortunately I don’t think I have enough blue filament for another large one.

Of course, he⁴ could always use the second print to go back in time and fix the ripple problem before his earlier self printed⁵ the first TARDIS. ⁶

1. Yes, I may well be a Doctor Who fanboy. [↩]
2. Tell me something I don’t know. [↩]
3. Two TARDIS‘es [↩]
4. Tony Buser One [↩]
5. Tony Buser Two [↩]
6. Sure, it might tear a hole in the universe, but I’m pretty sure he could fix that too. [↩]

Maker Lapse from Lucas Saugen on Vimeo.

Lucas Saugan made an awesome time lapse. Great to see the instructions so integrated into the build!