MakerBot Industries

Update: Bre here, Skimbal is an awesome designer who has just really impressed everyone in the MakerBot community. I’m excited to announce that we just hired him to make awesome projects and document them here at MakerBot Industries full time. He’ll be moving to Brooklyn to design, make, and document awesome MakerBottable things. To say we’re excited at MakerBot to bring him on board is an serious understatement. Be prepared for more Skimbal awesomeness coming soon to a MakerBot near you!

Turtle Shell Racer – High Power Edition by Skimbal

We got a glimpse of Skimbal’s Turtle Shell Racers in a recent photo from the Detroit MakerFaire, but a picture is even better.  If you ever had a doubt about the raw potential and power inherent in the humble MakerBot Cupcake CNC, please allow such misconceptions to be thusly dispelled.  Besides the incredible amount of work that went into designing and printing these, Skimbal obviously put a lot of work into the documentation as well.  He’s included all the STL’s files you’d need to print one, a list of materials, a PDF of how to assemble them, and, of course, a few videos of them in action!  Well done, sir!  Well done!

Go download the files for the Turtle Shell Racers at Thingiverse. Bonus! Download the awesome instructional booklet!

Check out this great Google SketchUp tutorial for MakerBot Operators from Tested.com! No doubt many of you have caught their show. I particularly love their MakerBot Mystery Build Fridays, for obvious reasons. Well, in addition to exploring the Thingiverse and printing with their brand new Thing-O-Matic, they are also helping all of us contribute more great designs.

Here’s a teaser from their post:

Most weeks, our famed MakerBot printouts are culled from a handy website called Thingiverse. It’s here that members of the CNC community can submit pre-made models for anyone to print — and if some of our past videos are any indication, there are some very good ones available too. But while it’s easy to print someone else’s creation, there’s something to be said for designing one yourself. There’s a sense of accomplishment that you just don’t get by mashing “print” on a pre-made design. (Read more.)

There are quite a few Google Sketchup tutorials out there, but not that many good ones focused on 3D printing with a MakerBot. Thanks to Tested.com for sharing the good stuff!

Yes.

This doesn’t need much explanation, and I think we all know where this is going. Thaed has started the process by taking advantage of the Google 3D Warehouse. (as a side note, check out the Google Sketchup Warehouse – some very cool and possibly challenging items to print!)

So, what happens when you combine one aggravated avian¹, Batist‘s slingshot, and a challenge to the Thingiverse community to upload a few other fowl balls? Perhaps just enough material for some kind of video…

Aggravated Avian. by Thaed

Taken from Google Sketchup Warehouse, I see this more as a tribute than anything else.

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Slingshot by Batist

I tried to print this one, but I scaled it to big... and it was warping a lot. Perhaps printing a mini version? UPDATE: Today I printed a smaller one, and it works like a charm! When I was a child I made slingshots out of wood... Living in a city nowadays (Ghent, Belgium) I can relive my youth by printing them. I hope one day my children will use tools like this to explore their creativity :-).

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1. From 3D Warehouse [↩]

Ok, we’ve covered something like this before.  However, Thingiverse user nmartin has re-created a classic here.  You don’t have to play too many records before you see one of these — the cheap, ubiquitous adapters that you’ll still find in 45rpm (7″ for the hipsters) records to this day.  But now, with your MakerBot, you can print one out for every single 7″ record you have!

This is either immensely exciting to you, or you’ve already stopped reading.

phonograph adapter for 45's by nmartin

The little thingy you put in the center of your old 45's to play on a phonograph

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