Malcolm Messiter is a musician whose harpsichord had started to grow a little quiet. After 43 years of use, he says the many of the parts have become brittle, and not long ago they started to break. This is a little story you’ll want to read all the way through to the end.

We often hear that MakerBots are used to create parts that manufacturers don’t ship anymore. That’s exactly the problem that Malcolm had for his 1970 Robert Goble harpsichord. He tells me in email that there are probably several thousand harpsichords made in the same time period — the 1970′s — that use plastic jacks. The jack is the part that holds the plectrum, which plucks the string when you press a key. These parts are now irreplaceable.

Well put on your MakerBot Goggles and you’ll see things a little differently. To replace all the jacks on this instrument with custom wood pieces (there are 183 of them), Malcolm would have had to shell out something like £2000. That’s $3100. And having custom plastic pieces made for the job? Forget about it.

But Malcolm has The Replicator, which can make anything, including 183 harpsichord jacks, and then 183 more. And now he has a functioning harpsichord. As far as we know, and as far as Malcolm knows, he is the first to perform this life-saving operation on a harpsichord. Like so many people on Thingiverse and others in the MakerBot world, he’s a total pioneer.

UPDATE! Malcolm tells me that, all told, these pieces average 3.62 grams when he makes them at 75% infill and one shell. MakerBot sells Natural ABS for $43 per kilogram. This means the entire repair set costs about $28.48 in materials.

Now here’s what you’ve been waiting for. Malcolm isn’t a harpsichordist. He’s an oboist with a tinkering spirit. Check out the custom iPhone stand he made (pictured above) so he could tune his harpsichord with both hands free. If he hadn’t been able to fix these jacks, then this amazing self-playing harpsichord wouldn’t work. And that would be a huge tragedy. Sit back, relax, and enjoy a little auto-Bach.

Just noticed this tweet.

$90 in espresso machine parts from Italy or $0.75 in ABS from my MakerBot. Not a hard call to make. i.imgur.com/cVi8k.jpg

— Chris Krueger (@TheNewHobbyist) May 17, 2012

Easy call, indeed.

Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 has been an incredible event, not just for the 100,000 or so people who came through here — still waiting for the official figures! — but also for the Makers. It’s been a weekend full of weirdness, magic, and…drama!

Here’s the scene: a middle school boy goes to a fantastic summer day camp, Galileo Learning, in Hillsborough, CA. He builds a great go-kart as his final project. But when Galileo transports the go-kart to Maker Faire, the steering wheel is dangling by a single bolt. Missing a nut!

The boy in our story, Adam, is a maker. He saw this problem and went out to fix it. When you’re at Maker Faire, you can probably find someone with the right size nut, right? Surely Tech Shop has one on hand.

Nope! Adam walked around the floor looking for a solution, and then… OH YEAH!

You can make the things you need! Over at the Tinkercad booth, Adam discovered that company’s incredible web-based design platform, and worked with the brilliant Henrik to draw out the right part. And since Tinkercad had a MakerBot right there on the table, he was able to make it on site in a matter of minutes. Shino writes over at the Tinkercad blog that the whole process took 45 minutes, beginning to end. Whoa.

Adam watches as The Replicator makes a part for his go-kart

Installing the nut, designed on Tinkercad

Thanks to the cooperation of friendly people in the Faire, Adam was able to slap the new part onto his go-kart and show his finished product how it was meant to be seen. As soon as we heard the story, we zoomed over to find him and decked him out with a MakerBot t-shirt and Awesome Award.

This is one rad kid, and I was so happy to hear his story, and he was happy to talk about it. Any teachers or parents out there wondering if kids really understand the power of being able to make things for themselves on a MakerBot, here’s a great example to remember.

Thanks for making our Maker Faire, Adam! And thank you to our great friends at Tinkercad for empowering kids the way they do.

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.