MakerBot Industries

Thingiverse is filled with useful items from the pig salt & pepper shakers to an array of cookie cutters. And who can forget the episode of MakerBot TV where Annelise MakerBotted her entire kitchen?

Jenn Garbee from LA Weekly’s Squid Ink food blog visited MakerBot at the Affordable Art Fair last week and was surprised to learn that “you could buy a 3-D printer for less than the price of dinner for four at The French Laundry.” (Yep, that’s $270 a person without alcohol or tip!) After perusing Thingiverse she blogged about the “Fun Food Things You Can Make on MakerBot’s New 3D Printer.” Check it out and start printing a hamburger press of your own!

Hello bot-people!  It’s Labor Day, which means that the summer is over, and it’s time to clean out the ‘cue for the winter, shutter the summer place, and settle in for a refreshing, ash-gray winter full of long, joyous workdays.  Without the distraction of sunny days and vacation, you’ll be more productive than ever!

Oh, but first, you’ll have to navigate the obstacle of today, the last barbecue Monday of the year.  Hopefully, this clever hamburger mold from Thingiverse user Asger will help you overcome the tedium of preparing meat over the sacred flame.

(Note: items printed on a MakerBot are not tested for food safety, so we don’t recommend actually forming hamburgers with this item.  We love the thought, though!)

Happy Labor Day!

Hamburgermold by Asger

Hamburgermold ! selfexplanatory but i'd keep it as fine in the print as possible, if it's too coarse it might be difficult to keep sanitary and clean. depending on ur material it's dishwasher safe? lol

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Thingiverse user Seanz0rz has done it!  Fully-printable PLA utensils!  Ok, our PLA supply is not food-grade, so I don’t receommend actually eating with these, nor is it the first viable spoon or fork (or spork, for that matter) but nevertheless it’s something of an achievement.  Totally normal-looking utensils! Printable on a MakerBot!

If there were some sort of global utensil apocalypse, wherein stainless-steel implements suddenly vanished from drawers everywhere, those with 3d printers could lead the way toward re-building our utensil culture.  Or something like that.

Even better, it’s a great example of what Thingiverse users can do when they set their minds to solving household problems.  While safety concerns may hold us back from recommending full-scale adoption here, we are clearly not far from a vast selection of print-on-demand household items.  Well done!

Knife, Spoon, & Fork by Seanz0rz

Here are some models of a knife, spoon, and fork. with the exception of the knife, these will need support material. Solidworks files included so you can make changes. i believe these are the first of their kind at least on Thingiverse. hopefully these will inspire others to create different models as well! They turn out to be fragile when printed. I will eventually update the stl's to create more robust utensils. the knife is almost at that point.

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Eggbot Nutrition Label by dnewman

Have you noticed the recent marketing of prepackaged produce?  I’m not talking about washed, bagged lettuce here.  I’m talking about a prune or a banana in a single serving plastic wrapper.  The prune, okay, maybe.  Unless you’re buying prunes individually this just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort.  As for bananas, pineapples, oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, avocados, kiwi, mangoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, and any other fruit where you do not consume the exterior…  I just don’t get it.  Perhaps it’s more pushed by a desire to utilize more marketing space on produce?

Dnewman’s solution is beyond elegant.  Why not just print the nutritional information right on the produce using an Eggbot??  I just LOVE this idea!  I would absolutely buy eggs from any producer that did this.  Not only is this idea so so so cool, but it opens the door to all kinds of other food labeling robots.  I mean, who wouldn’t want a Mangobot 2000?  Oh, and if you’re going to buy an apple, pear, or other fruit or vegetable where the exterior is consumed, why not just print with an edible ink? ¹²

Eggbot Nutrition Label by dnewman

In need of nutrition information for your large eggs? Then this drawing is just what you've been looking for! This is a 3200 x 800 pixel plot intended for plotting with the Eggbot. P.S. The text was rendered using the new Hershey Text extension by Windell Oskay and distributed with the latest Eggbot software release. It may be found in Inkscape under Extensions > Render > Hershey Text (after you update to the latest Eggbot software). The utility of that extension is not limited to just the Eggbot. Among other things, it provides nice, non-filled, single stroke fonts ideal for use in CNC and CNC-related applications.

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1. I suppose this would cause an infinite regression of trying to then print the ink’s own nutritional information on the ink itself…  [↩]
2. Wibbly wobbly… [↩]
3. I’m just letting it be known I had to restrain myself from using a number of other adjectives here. [↩]
4. Frankly, this is the mark of incredible self-control [↩]
5. I didn’t use the words extraordinary, example, or exemplary. [↩]