MakerBlock

First commissioned piece! [Draft 02/22/2010]

[That’s it. Just the title. I have no idea what this piece may have been, how much I was paid, or how long it took! I was just excited that my little 3D printer was making a little bit of money and started to share it with the world… before sitting in my drafts folder for … more than 15 years]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

more things i learned [Draft 02/20/2010]

put screws through the opto endstops first – to make sure they’ll go through
put the hex key through the body in order to line up the spacers
not all spacers are the same size
the heads that bite into the ribbon cable are difficult to clamp on
Adjust the y tension pulley as best as you can before installation of the caps
clipping the heads off of ethernet cables is very satisfying

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

MY robot [Draft 02/18/2010]

There really is something special about having built this robot for myself. I know it pretty well how it works and why certain design and engineering decisions were made.

I’ve also modified and customized this robot as I’ve used it. I’ve moved the extruder board, rotated the motherboard to give me better access to the SD card, drilled a few holes in the sides, yanked out the opto-endstops, extended the wires running to the extruder motor, thermistor, and nichrome. I’ve even designed a few minor printable upgrades.

When my extruder stopped working (twice) I just took it apart. I know I’m not going to break it as I do so. And, hell, if I do break it I’ll just fix it.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Rebuilding my extruder [Draft 02/16/2010]

[I put down the title and then did nothing. :) I suspect the other adjacent draft about printing with PLA was related to the need to re-re-re-build my extruder. The way extruders were built back then didn’t involve careful machining of custom nozzles and shaped channels for the plastic to flow. Instead, the PTFE tube went into the extruder and you kinda hoped for the best. If you had heat creep, didn’t cool down properly, etc, you had to disassemble everything and rebuild it all. But, such was the course of the hobbyist 3D printer enthusiast in the winter of 2010!]

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

How are you printing with PLA? [Draft 02/16/2010]

[There were two drafts with this title, one empty, and one with the single sentence below unfinished. Up until about January of 2010 I was printing in ABS which smelled bad and warped like crazy. But, it did print. When I started printing with PLA I found it difficult to work with, temperamental, wouldn’t melt or it would and then clog the extruder. I think at some point I suggested that PLA was only suitable for printing tears. Obviously, printers, PLA, and my maturity have come a long way since.]

I’d like to know, I really would.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Magic [Draft 02/03/2010]

[Reflecting back on this post is a little bittersweet. 2010 was an incredible time to be someone with a 3D printer at home. I remember Forrest Higgs’ detailed website about how he built his mostly wooden 3D printer. By my recollection, it was slow but accurate enough to make useable parts. Back then it was possible to read literally every single word published on the topic of 3D printers in about 30 minutes once a week – and I did. I read, and re-read, so many of Forrest’s posts leading up to and well after the purchase of my Cupcake. While Forrest’s site is no more, it lives on at Archive.org.]

Since I know basically nothing about how the actual electrical components of my MakerBot work, the entire thing is essentially magic to me. (OOooooh! Shiny lights!)

One of the things that kept me from buying a MakerBot in the beginning was the thought of trying to solder surface mount components. Admittedly, I wasn’t exactly a pro at soldering through hole components either, but the idea of soldering super tiny parts using a hot plate was certainly off-putting. I know the MakerBot guys said it is pretty easy, but I certainly had my doubts.

One of my favorite projects to monitor is Forrest Higgs progress on his Tommelise. His goal, as I understand from his blog, is to design/build a machine that could be built cheaply by a reasonably clever and motivated 12 year old. While the suggested cost of building a RepRap Darwin/Mendel is somewhere in the $500-$750 range, Forrest suggests a Tommelise could be built for as little as $150.

The trade off is that the Tommelise uses a lot of wood in its construction (cheap, but not RepRappable “vitamin” part), uses linear stepper motors, uses through-hole components so it doesn’t benefit from the nifty wizbang bits you can get in surface mount components, and prints slower than a RepRap. But, I keep thinking back to the breadboard prototypes Forrest puts up on site.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Plastic Screw Anchor [Draft 02/02/2010]

[This draft consisted of nothing more than these two links to plastic drywall anchors. Enjoy!]

http://images.google.com/images?q=plastic%20drywall%20anchor&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

http://www.plastic-anchors.com/plastic_screw_anchor.htm

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

MakerBot tuning [Draft 01/20/2010]

There’s a fair amount of tuning involved in getting a MakerBot running. Once assembled there may be some plastruder, Skeinforge, replicatorG troubleshooting before you get your first print. Once that’s done you’ll want to print up some upgrades and replacement parts, experimenting along the way. I figure there’s two parallel tracks to tuning a MakerBot – the hardware and the software.

Hardware tuning

Leveling the print platform
Adjusting belt tension
Adjusting plastruder idler wheel tension
Adjusting the stepper motor potentiometers

Software tuning

Skeinforge settings
ReplicatorG settings

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

Prototype Pricing [Draft 01/19/2010]

This is something I’ve thought about as well – what’s a fair way of pricing printed objects? I figure the potential costs associated with a build can be split into those build dependent costs and those costs which are uniform to every build.

Build dependent costs: (1) plastic (2) electricity (3) waste
Uniform costs: (1) set-up time (2) operator time

I’m not sure how to take into account the cost of the machine. You could incorporate it by including a cost for “machine time.” Then again, you could just tack on a set pro-rated cost of the machine to each build. Obviously, there’s a small amount of set-up – converting to gcode, then to the s3g code, moving the stages into position.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

More prints [Draft 01/04/2010]

Over the last two days I’ve printed a MakerBot coin, two chess pieces (both knights), two replacement Scrabble pieces (one printed vertically, one printed horizontally), two different tries at printing a dummy SD card, and a very loud whistle.

I’ve had difficulty re-printing the whistle once I changed some of my Skeinforge settings. (Dang.) I’ve also ended up with a plank of plastic instead of a Darth Vader head. It was being printed out with these really wild spikey bit sticking straight out of the head – several centimeters beyond where the raft ended. Non-optimal.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts