Speaking of whether or not you could MakerBot a “real” product¹ , here’s a fairly thorough little case study of one company using a Thing-O-Matic to manufacture a final product. Conclusion?

3D printers can make “Real” products
As of today, people will pay for 3D printed parts and as we develop new techniques for combining it with digital manufacturing technologies, such as laser cutting and water jet machining, our products will become more complex. We believe that our only limitation is our imagination.

I Heart Robotics, who are also in Brooklyn, give a great breakdown of all the costs that go into making a TriK Tripod Adapter (for a Kinect), which sells on their store for $19.95.

They say the only complaint they’ve gotten so far was when they couldn’t make the adapter in the color a customer wanted. That’s a pretty easy fix.

It’s also cool to see these guys using their Thing-O-Matic to produce a part where they’re not quite sure of the market. You don’t have to do too much market research if you can make the product on demand, and if you only sell 20 of them, you probably don’t want to sink a bunch of money into injection molding costs. They’ve sold 56 adapters since buying their Thing-O-Matic in September, 2011, which nearly pays for the machine itself. As they note in the blog post, with 107 units sold overall, they certainly could never have profited from another method of manufacturing.

1. okay, we were speaking about this a while ago… [↩]

You gotta love this. Have you heard about the Pebble Watch? Eric Migicovsky’s company Pebble has raised a record-breaking $10 million+ on Kickstarter¹ — with a week left in its campaign — to produce its Bluetooth supported smart watch.

They thought they’d raise enough money to make 1,000 of these beautiful and highly sought after watches. Well, now it looks like they’ll have to produce 85,000. That’s a tall order, except that they say they’ll use The Replicator to help the production process.

The team has smashed the Kickstarter record for funding, and collected its initial goal of $100,000 in a matter of two hours, and had surpassed $200,000 within four hours.

The Pebble crew is a ten person startup, which Migicovsky says is working around the clock on perfecting the software. Regardless of the team’s heavy workload, Migicovsky assures that backers will receive a Pebble in the order in which they were purchased. In the future, says Migicovsky, the production phase will bolstered upon the purchase of a MakerBot replicator.

More proof that a MakerBot is an essential tool for the entrepreneur.

via Digital Trends

1. !!!!!!! [↩]