MakerBot Industries

There have been a number of printable candle holders uploaded to Thingiverse lately.  In all seriousness, please do not use ABS or PLA for printed candle handle holders or any kind of use involving flame or heat.  ABS will catch fire, even without a blow torch, and keep burning while giving off a bad smelling and toxic smoke.  PLA becomes very malleable at low heat, will deform and melt, and could easily drop a candle.  That’s one of the reasons PLA can’t be used as a hot beverage or food container.

Please have a safe holiday season and do not use any ABS or PLA with or near flame or heat.¹

1. Remember:  Only you can prevent bunny fires. [↩]

MakerBot PLA is BACK! PLA is Polylactic Acid and it’s a MakerBottable plastic that is made from corn. When you make things with it, it smells like waffles! It’s a green plastic that is biodegradable. It’s clear and just begging you to embed LEDs in it. It also doesn’t shrink so it doesn’t have the curling issues that ABS has. The downside is that it is more “melty” than ABS and doesn’t handle overhangs as well as ABS does.

This PLA has been extruded to our specifications and works great with the MakerBot MK5 Plastruder.

Get MakerBot PLA 5 pound coils and MakerBot PLA 1 pound coils in the MakerBot store!

This news is HUGE for the DIY 3D printer community! We’ve been wanting to use PLA as a support material forever but we didn’t know how to dissolve it after. Domonoky and BonsaiBrain of iFeelbeta have cracked the nut and with their solution, you can dissolve PLA! Keep in mind that these are dangerous chemicals, it is serious enough that this chemical soup can be used as drain cleaner once diluted! If you are going to explore dissolving PLA, you may want to get some MakerBot PLA in the MakerBot store!

Be warned that the following chemicals are all dangerous, so handle them with care and with the proper safety precautions!

* Propan-2-ol

* Potassium hydroxide

* Aluminium hydroxide

We used technical propan-2-ol (98%) but you can also use pure propan-2-ol, 8.3% Potassium hydroxide (w/w) and a small catalytical amout (<1%) of Aluminium hydroxide.

A short manual how to prepare the “BetaSolution”:

For preparing the solution we gently warmed up the technical propan-2-ol in a waterbath to a temperature of about 40-50 °C. Be sure, the flask containing the propanol is not completely closed because of the rising vapour pressure. We used a flask made of glass with a perforated cap to prevent condensation of water and evaporation of propan-2-ol. After this, we took the flask out of the waterbath, dryed it from the outside, removed the cap and put the Potassiumhydroxide into it in small quantities. After each portion we stirred. The last little portion consists of about 0.5 g aluminum hydroxide which should also dissolve.

The solvatation of potassium hydroxide and aluminum hydroxide in propan-2-ol needs time. You generate a saturated solution, so don’t wonder, if it gets cloudy after cooling or takes much time to dissolve completely.

Store the resulting solution safely, out of reach of children in a glass container at a dry and cool place. If you use a plastic flask it might deform or the solution will react in another way with the flask.

For use, pour a small amount into a glass, so that your object is completely submerged in the solution, and wait for the PLA to be dissolved. Please only do this in a well ventilated area or outside, because the solution will give of flammable fumes. Dont smoke while doing this !

If you want to speed up the dissolving process, you can warm the solution with a water bath (NO open fire), and stir it with a ultrasonic cleanser or manually with a spoon. This will greatly improve the speed of the dissolving.

Please wear gloves and glasses when handling the warmed solution. It is as aggressive as drain-cleanser!

After dissolving the PLA you should wash your 3D-model with much water. We recommend to put it into another flask containing pure water and let it stand there for another hour. After this, you can dry it on air or with a hair blower.

The solution shouldn’t be disposed into drain without dilution! Let it cool to room temperature, if warmed, and gently put small quantities into a 5 times bigger amount of water. Now you can easily use it as drain-cleanser!

For added information, you can download a safety datasheet we preprared from here

Also we are now opening an onlineshop, www.2printbeta.de, where we plan to sell this solution and other reprap related parts after we get the neccessary permits from the government. So if you are in europe, stay tuned to get the BetaSolution directly from the inventors.

When releasing in december, we also provide a more detailed german and english manual how to use BetaSolution.

To the DIY community:

Have fun with the developement of a smart software to create suitable support structures! Have even more fun with printing and dissolving the generated two-component-objects to obtain a clean ABS structure with overhangs and bridges as much as you want!

Again, big ups and mad props to iFeel beta. They put hard work into discovering and developing it! When they launch their shop, buy the solution from them!

The temperature is dropping, and so are the leaves. That can only mean one thing – Halloween is ominously looming. To get you in the spirit of the season, we want you to design Halloween things – anything ghoulish, spooky, creepy, and cool. Be creative! Blow us away with your innovations.

A few parameters

1. Must be .stl file uploaded to Thingiverse and tagged with “Halloween”
2. Must be a new design as of 8 October, 2010
3. Deadline is Monday, October 18th at 11:11 p.m.
4. Must be innovative, spooky, and and printable with a MakerBot
5. Bonus points for requiring the Makerbot 3D Scanner v1.0 Kit, Unicorn, or Automated Build Platform

The best designs will be judged by our expert panel of holiday spirit guides, and creators of the best designs will receive a one pound roll of ABS!

Looking for inspiration? Check out some of these spooky designs already up on Thingiverse:

Whoodoo Box by Whystler

Spider ring by builttospec

Halloween smilie bob by deherzog

Ghost Bookmark by Mark A

Eyeball Monster by Zomboe

One of the joys of working with an open platform like the Cupcake is the ability to experiment with ideas that would be difficult or impossible to tinker with on a closed platform.  The other day I wanted to take a break, so I tried to print some patterned lampshades.

Creating a translucent patterned lampshade as a traditional 3D model doesn’t work very well. The small variations in wall widths are hard for slicing engines to handle. Your wall width will have to be a multiple of your extrusion width.  You’re also limited by the resolution of your X/Y positioning system. I decided to try a different approach.

Instead of embedding the design in a model, I wrote a script that takes a bitmap as input and generates gcodes to draw a straight cylinder or cone. The trick is to vary the wall thickness by extruding more plastic at the “darker” parts of the design. I did this by lowering the feedrate during these parts of the print; more plastic is extruded during the motion that draws that particular segment, and you end up with a thicker wall.

The advantage of this technique is that you can get very fine gradations of wall thickness– much finer than the positioning resolution of your X/Y stages, in fact. If you look at the “globe” patterned lampshade closely, you can actually see some subtle hyperbola-shaped gradations that are an artifact of the X/Y resolution of our machine.

This approach has applications beyond lampshades. You could use it to apply textures to model walls by reading ordinary 2d model textures as heightmaps, or someday even achieve “sub-voxel” print resolution by varying the wall thickness as the print head moves.

If you want to experiment with creating your own lampshade, you can download the script here, or explore the source on GitHub. Have fun!

colorbroken's Film Advance Crank

Colorbroken on Thingiverse just uploaded a 120 Film Advance Crank.  Replacement cranks and knobs are nothing new to Thingiverse.  Replacement cranks and knobs are probably the first repair people think of when looking at a MakerBot.  They’re easy to model, small enough to print without too many problems, and relatively easy to print.

What makes this particular knob special is how colorbroken designed it.  A typical knob design would include a thin cylinder sitting atop a flat… knobby bit.  Using Skeinforge, you would then set the desired fill ratio of plastic.  However, there are different benefits to different fill ratios. ¹  The problem with a heavy fill is that the part uses more plastic, takes longer to print, and is heavier – the upside being it will be a more sturdy part.  The problem with a low fill is the part is more sparse and potentially weaker² , but it prints much quicker and conserves plastic.

But what if you need one area of the part to print quickly and another area of the part to be extra sturdy?

Well, colorbroken thought of an interesting way around this problem.  By putting a hollow core inside the axle for the knob, the MakerBot printed a thick ring inside the axle.  The end result is the knob is whatever fill he specified, but the axle has a thick sturdy hard core running all the way through it providing additional strength and durability.  I love this design tip for its simplicity and effectiveness.

Thanks for the idea colorbroken!

1. Fill ratios aren’t rocket science.  I use 20% fill on all of parts unless I absolutely have to change that setting. [↩]
2. Although, I’ve printed amazingly sturdy parts using a fill as low as 10%.  It’s really a testament to the strength of ABS. [↩]

The answer is “better than the original.”

Better than the original

I had first seen Ian Johnson‘s Soap Dish on Thingiverse months ago, thought “cool,” and moved on.  A few days ago I stumbled upon Ian’s Flickr photostream and finally got the full story.

This is the original soap dish from Pottery Barn. It rests in a fixture attached to the wall, from which it has fallen many times and broken. It can’t be replaced because the line has been discontinued, but I want to continue to use the fixture, since the pedestal sink doesn’t really have room for a soap dish.

Ian designed a replacement soap dish in halves, so it would fit on the MakerBot print platform and asked Will Langford to print the parts for him.  He then glued the two halves together with black ABS drain pipe cement from the hardware store, dipped the dish in an ABS cement/acetone bath to smooth out the texture, sanded it smooth, painted it with his ABS dip to give it a glossy finish, and then gave it several coats of white liquid plastic.  For more information on Ian’s exact process as well as his photos of the intermediate stages, check out his photostream.

Bubblegum Pink ABS has arrived!

Hi Everybody-  Some good news for all you people who love printing in color on the CupCake CNC!  You can now get our full selection of colors in 1 pound rolls!  We know that some people just don’t love red, or blue, as much as they love yellow, so now you don’t have to deprive yourself ever again!  Buy all the colors, and then round it out with a 1 pound or 5 pound roll of delicious looking PINK ABS.   For the first week we are also offering a special reduced price to get them out to you on the cheap!

It’s Bubblegum Pink ABS time!

We are always trying to make working on your CupCake CNC easier,  so after some requests,  we have made available the Trifecta of Plastruder Washers!

(ok fine, some are called wheels, or retainers, but they are all round with a hole in the center!)

Furthermore, they are all cut from futuristic materials with the use of a LASER.

Drumroll please!

They are the Metal Retainer Washer:

The Acrylic Insulator Retainer:

And the Acrylic Idler Wheel!

Now available for order individually from the store!

Just a friendly reminder from Makerbot Industries that plastic filament and water don’t mix well.  We subjected some plastic samples some very humid conditions, i.e. submerging them in water for 48 hours.  Then the samples were used in a plastruder, and checked against a control group.  Turns out, the drenched plastic’s performance was awful, the extruded filament being more brittle and even “popping” during prints.

Turns out, the RepRap folks already know all about it:

Do not remove the coil from its packaging until you need it. The filament picks up atmospheric moisture in humid conditions, which forms bubbles of steam as the molten plastic extrudes.

-from VikOlliver at reprap.org

So now as an added precaution, Makerbot is now shipping all of our plastic in sealed bags with a silica gel packet to keep away humidity.  Happy Printing!