MakerBot Industries

This is good stuff — intrepid Thingiverse user Joakim has modeled a knob for the interior of a a legendarily rugged Land Rover Series II.  This has presumably broken after fifty years of running the vechicle in the Serengeti or somewhere equally exotic and treacherous, during one of the many ventilation changes necessary in this punishing environment.

Ok, so we’re not printing replacement camshafts quite yet, but this is still pretty cool.  After all, there are thousands of plastic parts in a modern (or, as we see here, not-so-modern) car.  Is anybody else using a MakerBot to fix them?

Extra points for including the manufacturer’s part number — well done, Joakim!

Landrover Series II Ventilator Knop by Joakim

This is part of spare part 337970 The one in the pencil square is the orignal boken one.

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Colbert Head Gears by emmett

Thingiverse citizen Pattywac recently organized a “MakerStrong Mashup Design Challege.”  The winner was to receive $60.00 from Pattwac himself with MakerBot kicking in another $100.00 in store credit!  And now it is time to reveal that winner…

Despite the difficulty of working with and not ruining such a flawless bust, there were some great entries to the Makerstrong design challenge.  Entries ranging from the beautification of my favorite childhood claymation show (Gumbert by JamieClay), to a tool for the next Colbert wannabe/stalker (Large Stephen Colbert Head by ALxD) made the judging process entertaining.

In the end emmett was able to claim the prize with a “decidedly creepier derivative” of his Heart Gears, which he called the “Colbert Head Gears.”

Congrats to emmett, the first repeat winner of these design challenges!

Thanks to everyone who created an entry and hope to see you next time!

Emmett, make sure to send Pattywac your paypal info!

Colbert Head Gears by emmett

Colbert Head Gears by emmett

This is my tribute to the twisted mind of Steven Colbert. It is also a decidedly creepier derivative of thingiverse.com/thing:6291. Print, assemble, and twist Colbert's head to your heart's content.

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Here’s a dead simple but ingenious print: a watering spike to put on those ubiquitous two-liter bottles.  Maybe it’ll help keep your plants from getting too dry during these super-hot summer days.

eagleapex‘s version is derivative (or perhaps a parallel development of) another watering spike by arkatipe.  It’s nice to see great minds racing to the same conclusion — that we need more printable gardening implements!

If you’ve got a gardening-related item, make sure it’s properly tagged with the word “gardening.”  Or, if you’re still in the planning stages, we’re excited to see it, so please model it up and share it to Thingiverse!

Watering spike for 2L bottle by arkatipe

I'm leaving for my honeymoon in a couple of weeks, so I needed a way to keep my plants alive between the times when the neighbor will stop in to water everything. So I made this watering spike. My bit of testing showed that it took about 12 hours on average for the water in the 2L bottle to drain. It lasts a little longer if the ground is wet to begin with. EDIT 7/26/11: Spike with Threads added. This one also includes 3 "fill layers" in the middle of the spike, which makes a sort of filter at 90% fill. It slows down the drainage a little bit, and keeps particles from being sucked up into the bottle.

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Watering spike for 2L bottle with threads by eagleapex

I started working on this before arkatipe uploaded his spike with threads. This is the difference(); of his spike and my 2L bottle threads: thingiverse.com/thing:10489

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A few weekends ago, Sheila Dharmarajan from Bloomberg’s “Innovators” series came to the Botcave for a visit — check out the great piece that resulted!

A few favorite moments:

• Sheila Dharmarajan’s lead in: “I’m about to become a plastic toy.”
• Bre’s explanation why printing a small plastic household good you know you want on your MakerBot is a heck of a lot more environmentally conscious than purchasing something off-the-shelf that travels across the world, guzzling up fossil fuels, just to sit in climate-controlled retail store waiting for you to need it.
• MakerBot Operator Chris Anderson (incidentally, also Editor-In-Chief of WIRED) talking about the Thing-O-Matic as an example of democratizing technology.

Photo Credit: Steve Garfield

Those of you living in the Greater Boston Area might want to pick up a Boston Globe this morning. Flip to the Business section to read a great piece about MakerBot from Mark Baard:

You’ve seen the cliché beginning to a technology story a thousand times: “It sounds like science fiction . . .’’ But the sci-fi lead is irresistible when it comes to describing a gadget that automatically manufactures single copies of everyday objects, like a replicator in Star Trek…. What you manufacture with the Thing-O-Matic is limited only by your imagination, or what you can find among the plans posted at MakerBot’s Thingiverse.com website. (Read more.)

Baard talks about the fun you can print with a MakerBot, and then tells of “serious projects” Professor Audrey Lee-St. John and her students are accomplishing at Mount Holyoke with their Thing-O-Matic — including modeling to predict how proteins might move and a potential collaboration with roboticist Dan Barry.

For those of us lacking a Boston Globe today… check out the rest of the article here!