MakerBot Industries

I love the sight of fresh cardboard

This week we’re finishing up shipping out batch 12. This spring we’ve had some challenges getting all the bits and pieces for this batch but things are moving right along. We’ve had a few experiences lately where we’ve literally bought out all the stock in the world of a part and had to get the parts custom manufactured for us which takes time. It may just look like a pile of boxes to you, but for us, these boxes are bundles of potential creative energy waiting to be opened, built into MakerBots and used to make almost anything. We really can’t wait to see what you do with them and we’re working hard putting these kits together and keeping them going out the door to you!

We’ve received our long awaited shipment of electronics and are busy shipping your Batch #11 CupCakes! We’ve put a lot of work into creating a new assembly line to be able to keep up with the huge demand for bots. Ian and Marisol are working hard to get you your CupCakes as fast as possible.

Marisol & Ian hard at work shipping CupCakes

Hard at work programming

Today we received a partial shipment of electronics at the BotCave! Unfortunately, we only received the extruder controllers so we’re still waiting on the RepRap motherboards. Widget and Matt are seen here programming the extruders to be ready to ship as soon as we receive the motherboards. Ahhh, the sweet smell of progress!

Nose to the Grinding Wheel

Many of our MakerBot users aren’t aware of all the hard work that goes in to producing a CupCake CNC. This is Part I of The Unsung Heros of the 3D Printing Revolution Miniseries. In this Miniseries, we will explore some of the processes that transform raw materials into your CupCakes, right here in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

CupCake’s aren’t all electronics and motors. We put a lot of hard work and elbow grease into making your robot. In this photo we see Widget, MakerBot Employee #2, preparing Z-Rods for the batch 11 shipment of your CupCakes. The Z-rod controls the height of the plastruder head during printing operations and four rods are required per CupCake. Widget carefully shapes each rod by hand, taking care afterward to inspect each one according to our rigid quality standards. Each rod is then carefully packaged, sealed and labeled. This is just one of the hundreds of labor-intensive processes we take to ship your bots.

In the next part of our Miniseries, The Unsung Hero’s of the 3D Printing Revolution, we will take a look at the people who assemble and build your CupCake CNC’s.

I want one of these robot hands to load and unload my CupCake!

It’s a dangerous and highly skilled job, but soon bomb disposal experts serving in Afghanistan could be helped by a robot created in north London.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8527000/8527911.stm