MakerBot Industries

Nate True is an old buddy of mine from Seattle and shepard of the great site cre.ations.net. He’s hotrodded his extruder! Check it!

After some failures Wednesday and today, my dad and I came up with some fixes to the extruder that have made it work fantastically now.N

The first failure was the PTFE barrier bulging out and leaking ABS all over the place – we solved that by using a new PTFE barrier and surrounding it with a 1/2″ copper pipe slip joiner with a slot hacksawed lengthwise into it so that it could change size and slip around the barrier.  Then we used hose clamps to clamp really hard down on the copper fitting so that it would not bulge out.  There’s a heat sink on there too but we are not sure whether it’s really helping any.  Sure looks cool though!

The other failure was the insulator retainer plate starting to crack due to the high pressures.  I had the genius idea to put the screws right into the plastruder body, rather than using the plate at all, and was surprised to find out that it all fit together just fine that way. Now the tension is on three parallel plates of acrylic rather than bending a single plate of acrylic around a bend.

The last fix is one that I’ve had on for a long time, that’s the M6 nut around the heater barrel which makes sure the heater barrel is pushed into the PTFE barrier threads, rather than the barrier threads being the only thing holding the heater barrel on. I didn’t have an M6 nut so I just used pliers to make a makeshift nut out of very small brass tube. It works fine!

I post hoping others will find solutions to their extruder problems and that others will suggest more solutions.

More info like this is awaiting your eyeballs in the MakerBot Google Group.

Hive76 has been playing with heated build surfaces! Check it!

So tonight we realized that the 4″ putty knife we had been using to scrape off objects from the makerbot build platform was actually perfect for addressing BOTH of these problems. We put the putty knife between the heat and the build surface… The metal surface conducts the heat evenly to about 80% of the build surface now. So how do you pick up this hot stage? A huge bonus is that even though the stage is now too hot to hold at the edges, we have a sturdy handle that doesn’t interfere with printing!

via “Handling” Hot Build Surfaces.

Pleasant Hardware has been rocking it lately by hooking up an LCD screen to their MakerBot. Check it out and then click on the link below to go check out their other work, it’s great!

Pleasant Hardware – 3D printing with MakerBot and other hardware.

Here’s are video from the early days of RepRap experimentation in 2007! Science!

Elijah Wood decided he wanted a RepRap, but you need a RepRap to make a RepRap so he made a RepStrap RepRap! Then he made a really nice site to document it all. Check it!

When I first met Zach Smith in the summer of 2007, I asked him what he made and he replied that he was working on robots that make robots and I remember saying something to the effect of “Count me in!” and I would go meet him in his very small little workshop that was on the catwalk of a video studio in Williamsburg. We were working on a machine to make machines that could make machines. We made a few videos together about it and then the rest is inevitable history.

Elijah says,

I started this whole RepRap project about a month ago. I got hooked on RepRap right when I saw the Make podcast that Bre Pettis did. I thought I could probably build my own for cheaper and maybe customize it better than I could from a kit. So, I set out to design a RepStrap with parts that I had lying around my house. I built my base out of PVC pipe (which I have tons of) and some basic steel pluming parts (the part that hooks the PVC into the back of the Z axis). I made the X and Y axis frame out of aluminum angle iron. I actually almost copied the McWire CNC design on Instructables Other than the Instructables design, I had to do a lot of research on the axis. I was curious what other RepStrappers were doing. I was deciding for days whether to use the threaded rod drive system or the belt drive. I eventually went for the threaded rod design because I had most of the materials I needed already and because in the podcast Bre used that method. For the electronics, I used the generation 2 Arduino equipment. I used this because I was already familiar with the Arduino way of coding. Some problems I faced were that there are so many versions of code out there so I had to try many different versions and eventually I had to ask on the forums for the correct firmware. Another problem was that the stepper drivers V1.2 kept frying. I’m not really sure why, but I would recommend either getting the newer version V2.3 or buy 1 extra just in case. Other than this, there were no more problems and after some time I did get everything working fine. The total price I paid for the whole thing was about $300. Compared to other designs mine is very crude, but for the price it gets the job done.

Seeing this machine takes me back to a time at the roots of MakerBot and trying to figure out how to make a cheap and accessible 3D printer by strolling the aisles of hardware stores! We still do that!

Bre Pettis of Makerbot Brings 3D Printing to ABC News Radio from ABC News Radio on Vimeo.

Dan Patterson interviewed Bre about the MakerBot on ABC news. Check it out!

Makerbot2 from Preethi Dumpala on Vimeo.

Preethi Dumpala wrote us up and made this wonderful video for the Silicon Alley Insider

I’ve been wanting to mess around with David Scanner for a while but it only runs on windows and I’m hardly ever around a Windows machine. Since it’s the weekend, I was able to hijack Marisol’s computer and give it a go.

I went to the corner store and bought a model of a knight’s helmet to scan. The helmet was silver and we just happen to have spray chalk, so I sprayed it down with the chalk and that made it nice and matt and perfect for scanning. Reflective things are bad for scanning because they reflect the laser line. Spray chalk is great, but I had to do some touch ups because it rubs off very easily.

I acquired a laser level and a webcam and then began the setup. There is some preparation involved. You have to assemble a model of a backdrop and then get all the pieces in place and go through a set up calibration process. Once I did all that, which took a few hours of reading the manual and getting everything adjusted, I swept the laser line over the model and it makes a point cloud.

I saved an stl file and even though I was using a super high resolution webcam (720×1240) it downconverted it to 320×240 because I don’t have a license. I made three different scans, one from the front and one from each side and then spent about 2 hours learning how to mesh them together in the David Scanner software only to find out when I went to save that this is an option that only works if you have a license. It’s clear in the documentation that this isn’t a free feature, but I wish I had a heads up before I spent all the time meshing the stls together.

In steps Meshlab to the rescue. It’s an open source program that does joins meshes! With Meshlab I was able to take my low resolution stl files and put them together and then do a poisson thing that brings them all together into one mesh. I ended up with an stl model that looked like a very low resolution copy of the knights helmet.

Update: You can listen and comment about the show here on the on point radio website. Check it out and comment away!

On Monday, Bre will be on NPR with Justin who wrote the awesome WSJ article about DIY earlier this week. Bre has to be there ar 10:45AM. It will be live so in theory it will be on at 11AM EST or around there. You can listen online at http://www.onpointradio.org/.

Tonight MakerBot will be on the air in NYC on the WBGO Journal tonight at 7:30 p.m. WBGO is at 88.3 FM or you can listen in on WBGO.org.

Update: Here’s the page to go check MakerBot out on WBGO. Also, here is the MP3. The MakerBot section is about halfway through. Jon Kalish is an awesome reporter!