Right before our press conference today to announce the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer, the Replicator 2X, MakerWare, and the MakerBot Store, our table looked like a USB cornucopia. The table was flowing forth with USB sticks.

We wanted to give members of the press something easy to carry around, but you know we couldn’t just toss out a random USB stick. It needed a special MakerBot touch, and in keeping with the spirit of the day, it needed to be high resolution and made from MakerBot PLA. Our designer Jason nailed it. The shape has detailed wings surrounding a MakerBot logo. At the 100-micron layer resolution of the Replicator 2, none of this detail is lost and it all looks amazing, like something you’d normally buy off a shelf.

The stick is also perfectly shaped for the USB insert, which snaps snugly into place. This is one of the reasons we love PLA. When you’re designing at the scale where things need to fit together reliably, you need a material that won’t expand and shrink significantly. PLA is perfect for this; you just get what you expect.

If you’re not already familiar with PLA, check out the new filament page in our online store. You can easily click through ABS and PLA options in one place and see all the colors at once. PLA gives us the chance to explore matte colors like the yellow USB stick in the picture, but also finishes like shimmery, metallic, translucent (like the Green PLA in the picture), and sparkly.

Here’s a nice family shot of our current PLA offering, but watch this space for more to come!

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.

Hey, look at our store! We just added six super sweet new colors, and five of them are PLA. More on that material here, but for now, just dig these hues.

Green PLA, but come on, that’s Leaf Green if we’ve ever seen it. Look how shimmery it is, and start imagining what you could do with this around the holidays. A little backlighting, anybody?

This is listed as Yellow PLA, but we call it Buttered Corn Yellow. Don’t you just want to bite into that? (Note: 4 out of 5 dentists think you shouldn’t bite into this.)

Transparent Blue. This truly looks watery and frozen, so we call it Icicle Blue. Add some chill to your summer. In the sense of cold but also, like, chiiiiiillll.

While we’re getting summery, throw a couple of these flamingos on the lawn, now with the most vibrant pink ABS in our store: Stellar Pink.

Orange PLA. We think this looks so perfect for a pumpkin that we went straight for it. Now might be a great time to start thinking about Halloween designs, and this is the perfect Earthy looking orange for that type of thing.

White PLA. This is a great addition to the White ABS we added to the store recently. The PLA looks a little whiter on the spool, but both make for excellent true-white things. To prove it, we made a set of nesting igloos.

We’re super happy to offer these new colors of PLA for the first time. You’ve seen our designs, now show us what you got. If you’re in the market for some filament, grab one of these and start uploading some good pictures to Thingiverse.

Here’s the take-home point of the Instructable I’m sharing with you here:

…it’s possible to 3d print a mold with existing technologies for limited use.

Nice!

For this experiment, Bryan Brutherford (whose work we have previously shown some Pinterest Love) made a 3D-printed mold of his Brutherford Industries logo. In this case he used a high-res Objet printer to print an acrylic photo-polymer mold. The result looks pretty smooth.

Next Bryan sprayed the mold with some silicone mold release, such as this one, and injected some melted cellulose acetate pellets — who among us doesn’t have some cellulose acetate lying around?

It looks like it took six tries to get the injection just right, and that’s not bad. The final result is a really sweet keychain.

What does this mean for MakerBot owners? According to his Instructable, the mold started to deform after 20 uses or so. We do already know that other low-melting point materials can do pretty well in an ABS mold. This sign on Thingiverse by Tinkerer was cast in pewter.

The printed mold here came from an expensive desktop unit, as Bryan is an industrial designer and indicates he used an Objet. Prints on a MakerBot can be stunningly detailed and fine right off the build platform. And if you’re looking to create even smoother surfaces on your print, there are several easy solutions that we’ll be detailing in an upcoming episode of MakerBot TV.

Does anyone have any experience with injection molding?

One of the questions I hear a lot when I am out at events – showing MakerBots to people who have never seen them before – is, “What is the cost of materials for a MakerBotted object?” Sure, filament is inexpensive, but how much filament are you using when you print? In this episode I’ll show you exactly how to calculate that cost. I’ll also reveal the number of chess pieces that can be printed with a single spool and the cost of MakerBot plastic by cm³ and inch³. All that and more on this week’s episode of MakerBot TV.

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 [↩]

While we have been hard at work getting our MakerBot Replicators assembled and packed for our imminent shipping launch, several of us have been putting the early prototype Replicators in the office to hard use.

There are a number of questions about plastic and printing that have tickled our imaginations for quite a while — questions easier to answer now thanks to the improved ease of use of our latest machines. The first question we tackled is our most frequently asked one: “How much can you print with a single 1kg MakerBot Spool?”

The answer “Approximately 1kg of printed parts!” is correct, but it isn’t very satisfying. So we looked for a model to help us demonstrate this point more clearly. Being nerds, we figured standard chess pieces are the ideal metric.¹

So a couple of weeks ago, Michael Curry grabbed an early Thingiverse chess set from cbiffle as a place to start.² We skeined up these files as individual pieces, as a cluster of the six uniques, and then just said “heck with it” and went for the whole shebang: an entire side of a chess set in one go. Michael began printing. And printing. And printing. “Surely we can print like over 100 pieces with one spool, right?” I said.

And printing, and printing, and printing. A handwritten sign on the bot read: “Please keep printing chess!” And finally, just this week, the experiment was completed.

Here’s what we learned.

• A single spool of plastic produces 392 chess pieces.
• 392 chess pieces makes a little over 12 complete monochromatic chess sets.
• The MakerBot Replicator ships with two spools — 1kg of Natural ABS and 1kg of Black ABS.
• MakerBot Operators can print over 24 complete black and white chess sets with the plastic they receive with a new Replicator!

Check out the field of chess produced by the single spool — a MakerBot Replicator with 1kg of plastic absolutely crushes at printing chess!

1. Because all of us are playing chess every day, right? Well, if only it were true. What does the castle and the beak piece do again? I know what the horsey piece does, it jousts! [↩]
2. With his kind permission! [↩]

Foam Dart Pistol by SuperAmi

Thingiverse citizen SuperAmi resized vik’s Foam Dart Pistol for printing in a Thing-O-Matic and added a few features – such as a sight.  I love that these little guys are clearly taking the brand new gun sights very very seriously.¹²

I can also appreciate that each of the guns has a different colored muzzle.  This is probably one of the very best reasons I’ve seen for having multiple colors of plastic on hand.  Easy color differentiation means there won’t be a dispute about who has whose toy – and of course, allows for additional kid customization. ³

1. I would suppose you’d really need a gun sight if you were wearing an eye patch. [↩]
2. Then again, I’m not sure that lining up a gun sight using your eye patched covered eye is the best move. [↩]
3. Pink!  PINK!!! [↩]

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!