MakerBot Industries

Evolution of a replacement caster

Robert Bowbridge used his MakerBot print his new designs for a replacement caster for his dining room table.  One of the amazing things about having a 3D printer in your own home is that there’s no harm to trying a new crazy design or improvement.  There’s also no harm in trying out a rough draft and refining the designs as you go along. Robert offers two great tips for designing and working with a MakerBot:

1. Design a simple model, add the high-accuracy features, print, test for fit.  Once the important sections of the replacement part have been dialed in, begin playing with and improving the design.
2. If you’re using Google Sketchup, try the Rounded Corners plugin by Fredo6 to round or bevel edges.  You can do this manually in several ways, but they are time consuming.  Robert noted an issue with Sketchup not correctly handling intersections between “extruded” sections.

Google Sketchup is still my digital design program of choice for its gentle learning curve.  I’ve noticed the same issue with Sketchup, namely that it will allow objects and geometries to collide with one another without actually intersecting.  Basically, there’s no line between the colliding objects.  This can cause all kinds of design and printing problems.

If you have this problem too, here’s a work around:

1. Select those objects, lines, and surfaces you wish to have intersect.
2. Right click
3. Intersect -> Intersect Selected
4. Done!

(For more thoughts on designing with a 3D printer, I highly recommend Forrest Higgs’ recent blog post on the topic.)

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.