The MakerBot materials group has been busy. Look at all the amazing new colors that popped up in our store recently! Jason and Todd put together some sweet examples to inspire you.

LEFT TO RIGHT…

SLATE GRAY

This Castle of the Maker Empire by jbakutis looks like every story book mansion you wanted to crawl around in. The texture detail looks so good in our new Slate Gray ABS, you almost want to go find all the secret passage ways, amirite? Buy it here.

STONE

Jason’s Olmec Diorama shows another beautiful natural color, the new Stone ABS plastic. Teachers, this color is perfect for making some of the Egyptian artifacts that have popped up in Thingiverse. Everyone else, how about something new for the garden? Buy it here.

HELSINKI SKY

This picture perfect Bluebird shows off a bold addition to our blues, Helsinki Sky. Perfect for jewelry or things around the house, or for the eyeballs on that Frank Sinatra statue you’ve been dying to make. Buy it here.
 

GREEN SEA

Todd’s Genie Bottle couldn’t be better to capture this exotic green. This color may inspire you to put all of your favorite Moroccan jewelry designs on Thingiverse, or match up with Helsinki Sky for the rockingest diorama ever. Buy it here.

GRAPE CANDY

Our first real purple filament! Make surprisingly real-looking grape candy, or a Cute Octopus waving one tentacle at the world. Buy it here.
 

NAVY WOOL

This deep navy blue has an incredible richness to it. It’s such a monumental addition to our store, Jason had to model the largest animal that ever existed for his Escape From Leviathan design. Buy it here.
 

DARK SANGUINE RED

Another really rich new color for you to go wild with. Wild like a freaking awesome Automaton Dragon! Something about “sanguine red” also screams Halloween. Buy it here.
 

ACID LAKE

Somewhere between cyan and turquoise, this new blue-green plastic makes for some eye-popping creations. Check out Jason’s Labyrinth Game above and start thinking which games or sculptures or masks you might get started on. Buy it here.

DEEP DARK TEAL

Papa needs a new pair of shoes; deep dark teal shoes. Combined with some of the other rich colors in this collection, you could make some pretty striking stuff. Buy it here.

All of us wonder what to do with scrap plastic, and while the world tackles the challenge of re-filamentizing all those goodies, let’s remember there are good ways to use it. RichRap has invited everyone to make their own art out of melted PLA and submit the photos to his Thingiverse entry.

Here are the basics from his blog, and a few pics, including one version from 2ROBOTGUY.

You will need -

An oven
Baking tray
Aluminium foil
Scrap bits of PLA and any failed prints
Beer – (to help with artistic inspiration)

Lay the Aluminium foil on the tray and place your largest scrap parts onto it, don’t space them too much apart as they will produce a smaller pool of plastic than you would think.

Optionally use some filament to make a round or shaped outer ring to keep all the plastic in if you want a nice shape.

More at Rich’s blog.

All of RichRap's scrap plastic from before April 12

2ROBOTGUY's scrap plastic art

via Ponoko blog

Oh…pranks.

A couple of the guys in Software thought it would be fun to mess with our CTO, Adam Mayer. Far, our head of software, first thought to model up a fake keyboard and replace the one on Adam’s desk. Joe suggested a mouse instead, MakerBotted in black ABS.

That cord is just a string of black ABS. The joke really threw Adam for a minute, who finally flipped the mouse over to see what the problem was. Of course he realized immediately what had happened, and just so everyone could share in the fun, there was a smiley face staring back at him.

Kudos to Todd for designing this thing, and I’m further impressed that Far and the others were able to wait patiently until the next morning to watch this unfold.

So now you know what MakerBot software guys do for fun.

UPDATE! The mouse model by Zenix is now up on Thingiverse. Go get it and mess with your favorite/least favorite coworker today.

Untitled by custom3dstuff

This thing brought to you by

Since we started the chess set design challenge with Tinkercad, I have been so interested in the history of chess pieces. Why do we use the pieces we use and how did they get their shapes? Wikipedia provided a quick and easy overview. Essentially, the Rooks (castles), Knights (horsies), Bishops (the other one), and pawns derive from an earlier set of pieces that represented four divisions of a military force. Fair enough.

This caught my eye, though:

The practice of playing chess for money became so widespread during the 13th century that Louis IX of France issued an ordinance against gambling in 1254.

Whoa! Chess gambling was such a problem that Saint Louis himself, the Louis of the Louis(es)¹ to outlaw it altogether? Holy Romans were such nerds! But this begs the question, how exactly did they gamble on it? What if you had a draw?

To the GoogleBooks! This 1860 gem from Duncan Forbes – and I’m not kidding, it is an absolute delight to read – gives some fun context.

Cool! But also, what?! This is all meaningless to me, especially since the reference point, the farthing, has disappeared. Back to the Internet! This is what I found out about British coin denominations:

The shilling was subdivided into twelve (12) pennies.

The penny was further sub-divided into two halfpennies or four farthings (quarter pennies).

2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1d)
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3d)
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a ‘tanner’) (6d)
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s)
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a ‘two bob bit’) (2s)
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6d)
5 shillings = 1 Crown (5s)

I say with all due respect to our friends in the Isles that some empires were simply destined to fail. Let me distill the information above.

A penny and “pence” are the same thing for our purposes. A sixpence is worth six times as much as a penny, and a penny is worth four times as much as a farthing. A sixpence is therefore 24 farthings. Since a shilling was itself only one twentieth of a pound sterling, a farthing was only 1/960^th of a pound.

All of this got me thinking. How much did it actually cost to buy a chess set in Ancient Persia? If we know how much they traded pieces for, that’s probably a great indicator of how much a whole set cost.

But wait just one more tick. How much is a chess piece worth if you print it on a MakerBot? I have a sneaking suspicion these guys were spending way too much on their chess sets. So I set out to prove it.

The info above gets us nowhere. In order to determine how much these pieces were really worth, I needed to know how the value of a pound has changed over time. Sources tell me an 1860 pound sterling was worth 91 times more than a 2012 GBP.

Throw in today’s exchange rate of 1.594 USD to 1.0 GBP, here’s what we get.

• One 1860 farthing is worth 14 cents in 2012 USD.
• One 1860 penny is 56 cents in 2012 USD
• One 1860 sixpence is $3.36 in 2012

Going back to the passage above, we can now show the current values of these pieces.

King — Priceless. Step off.
Rook — one dinar, or sixpence, or $3.36 (in 2012)
Knight — four dangs, or four pennies, or $2.24
Queen — two dangs and three tasu, or two pennies and three farthings, or $1.54
Bishop — one dang and three tasu, or one penny and three farthings, or $.98
Pawn — one dang, or one penny, or $.56

This means the total cost of an ancient Persian chess set was something like $38.36, plus whatever value was assigned to the kings.

Now. We printed this set in ABS, which we sell for $48/kilogram. That’s 4.8 cents per gram. As an aside, we also recently proved you can print 392 chess pieces from one spool of plastic. Whoa. I wanted to get more precise, so I weighed each piece and came up with the following:

King — 6.0 grams = $.29
Queen — 4.8 g = $.23
Knight — 3.4 g = $.16
Rook — 3.0 g = $.14
Bishop — 1.8 g = $.09
Pawn — 1.4 g = $.07

This brings a grand total of $3.72. That’s a tenth of the Persian price.

After this research, I’ve unilaterally decided on a new tagline for our company. You heard it here first:

MakerBot Industries, 90 percent discounts on chess sets, since the Tenth Century.

1. performed by the surprisingly aptly named Kingsman [↩]

We’re excited to announce that we’ve started carrying Sugru in the MakerBot store. This air curing rubber is just plain fantastic! It feels like modeling clay, and you simply hand mold it into the shape you need – that’s pretty much it. It cures in under 24 hours, taking on the characteristics you expect of rubber – it’s soft, flexible, grippy, waterproof, and can withstand extreme temperatures. It’s a fantastic way to improve everyday items in your life – The first thing I did was fix my fraying laptop power cable.

But that’s just the tip of what’s exciting – it’s all about what happens when you attach Sugru to one of our favorite filaments. It turns out Sugru bonds particularly well to ABS, making the two completely inseparable buddies. Want proof? Check out the video at the bottom.

We have a lot of cool ideas for tricking out Makerbot Prints with Sugru – In fact our very own Annelise has kinda fallen in love with the possibilities, so she’s been making all sorts of fun things that we’ll show you in the next few days.

We’re also planning on hosting a Thingiverse design challenge to see what kinds of interesting uses for Sugru our talented community can come up with. I have no doubt awesome things will happen with Sugru and Makerbots. Basically Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Sugru comes in large pouches of 12 minipacks in multiple colors for $18 or black and white for $20 on our store starting today.

A quick update from the Botcave stockroom: we’ve just had a delivery of ABS plastic and we are pleased to be able to offer some MK7-compatible 1.75 mm plastic.  Small-filament ABS has been a hot commodity since we first announced the Stepstruder® MK7, so don’t hesitate if you’re in the market for a few spools!

We’re also pleased to announce for that we can offer silver ABS in 3 mm filament for the first time, for those of you printing with MK6 and earlier extruders!

ABS, PLA, PVA, Oh My! In this episode of MakerBot TV we explore the ins and outs of our three printable plastics. Find out what they’re made of and how to print with them. Also hear about the tiny green men that are invading the Bot Cave! Don’t miss this stellar episode of MakerBot TV! Thank you Thingiverse users tbuser for the f-bomb design and gpvillamil for the flying saucer and tiny green men. 

The Stuff of Invention

Today we are launching the third round of our ABS and PLA plastics as they switch to being supplied on spools in Kilogram weights. The last of our classic colors and styles are now available in both 3mm and 1.75mm filament formats, and some previously unavailable formats are now up in the store! I am happy to report that our crowd-favorite UV reactive “Nuclear” green is now in our classic 3mm format, so Plastruder MK4, MK5, and MK6 3mm users rejoice! Also notable is PLA 4043D filament is now available in 3mm and 1.75mm formats- so hop to it if you want some of this great print stock.

Here’s the full selection of new plastic offerings!

Nuclear Green ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Blue ABS 1kg Spool 1.75mm Filament

Blue ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

MakerBot PLA 4043D – 1kg spool -1.75mm

MakerBot PLA 4043D – 1kg spool -3mm

Yellow ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Fluorescent Red ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Red ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Check out our full variety of plastics in the MakerBot Store here!

In this episode, Ethan prints the Space Shuttle as a multi-colored object, and Matt demos “Party Mode” for your Bots! Robot Hospital! Episode Four!

Completely Printed Chess Set

Not only have I finished printing a full chess set, but the black pieces are in ABS while the clear/white-opaque pieces are in PLA.¹  When I was rocking my MK4 Plastruder² the 5 pound roll of PLA I had purchased was a sore subject for me.  Given the amount of heartache I went through trying to print with clear PLA, it seemed a natural foil to a black ABS side.

Basking in the warmth that follows a nice big Thanksgiving dinner I played chess against my younger brother, whom I haven’t bested in about ten years³ , on a board made by our father, using pieces designed by cbiffle, and printed on my MakerBot.  After a hard fought game⁴ with only nine pieces left on the board, I was up a knight, offered a draw, and we shook on a good game.⁵⁶⁷

1. Printing a full chess set has been on my to-do list for nearly a year, even before I had an operational 3D printer. [↩]
2. If you’ve got a MK4 Plastruder, I highly highly recommend upgrading to the MK5.  I could gush for days about my MK5.  You really deserve an extruder like this. [↩]
3. In chess.  Well, or anything else for that matter… [↩]
4. With much kibitzing from our dad. [↩]
5. Call me a coward, but I’d rather offer the draw while I was up, rather than fumble the endgame and get brow beaten by a pawn I forgot to take.    [↩]
6. See Allan?  I’m not ALL bravado! [↩]
7. Now, where’s did I place that printed thimble I keep all my humility in??? [↩]