For less than $1,000, the MakerBot kit provides nearly everything you need for your very own 3-D plastic printer. We find out what it takes to build and use one
Posted 08.03.2010 at 11:58 am
12 Comments
Cupcake CNC
The kit requires only some simple bolt-together assembly and basic surface-mount soldering. A simpler software interface is currently in the works.
John B. Carnett
It sounds like the promise of an ad in the back of a PopSci issue from the 1950s. Build your own replicating machine! Make anything you desire in your own garage! But that’s exactly what veteran hacker Bre Pettis and his pals offer with their CupCake CNC kit: a computer-controlled 3-D printer that can whip up almost any object of less than four inches on a side from two kinds of plastic. The company’s goal is to make home manufacturing cheap and common. And the whole setup is open-source, so anybody can modify and improve the design, or even copy it wholesale.
Click to launch the photo gallery for a piece-by-piece look at building the Makerbot
Fine Art or Bust: The MakerBot prints in plastic, and will soon also be able to use cake frosting or clay.
h John B. Carnett
It turns out that the trickiest part of making a 3-D printer kit is the software coding that tells it what to do. After several e-mail exchanges with Pettis, we finally got the beast moving. Unfortunately, our first effort looked more like modern art than the pulley we were going for. The machine is not impossible to master, though. Makerbot.com is full of examples of amazing printed objects, and a sister site, Thingaverse.com, hosts thousands of shared 3-D models that you can just download and plug in, once you get a handle on the software.
Build A 3-D Printer
Time: 3 Days Cost: $950 Easy: 3/5
EXTRUDER CONTROLLER: The top is the controller board. The bottom—the orange head—is the part that gets very hot. Solid plastic enters the top and moves into a heated head that melts it. The movement of this part in three dimensions, and the start and stop of the flow through the head, determine the final shape of the printed object.
Extruder Controller: John B. Carnett
THE XY STAGE: When it’s fitted into place, this part will move left and right and back and forth to position the extruder that dispenses the plastic.
The XY Stage: John B. Carnett
IDLER WHEEL: This feeds the ABS plastic line into the extruder. We marked it up with black lines so that we could track its movement as it spins.
Idler Wheel: John B. Carnett
THE KIT: Everything is packed well and clearly labeled for easy identification during the build. The deluxe version of the kit even includes tools and a power supply.
The Kit: John B. Carnett
5 Things to Know Before Tackling a MakerBot Build
1. Depending on your operating system, some coding skills may be necessary. If your comfort level with software stops at formatting text in Word, find a friend who knows his way around code.
2. Because different parts require different temperature and speed settings for the plastic-dripping nozzles, it’s not really a click-to-print setup yet. Plan extra time and materials for trial runs, and for cleaning the nozzles between jobs.
3. The printer kit is smaller than you might expect. My big hands fumbled with many of the tiny parts. Keep needle-nose pliers and, ideally, a friend with smaller, more nimble hands nearby.
4. Use the wiki on makerbot.com as you go. It has good, updated step-by-step instructions for the hardware assembly. Check out the forums as well for further help from people who have been through the build process already.
5. The CupCake is not yet a robust manufacturing system. But its open-source roots and the community of early adopters growing around it mean that you can keep upgrading and improving it over time.
Click to launch the photo gallery for a piece-by-piece look at building the Makerbot
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If you made one..would you be able to make every component required to make another one, with the first machine that you printed?
Well given that some of the parts are metal and electronic, I'm guessing those might be able to be made to look like the original piece, but not be functional.
no but you could remake that missing last modal piece :0
Good thing that I don't need one of these because they lost me at surface mount soldering. I worked in electronics for years, and can solder reasonably well -- but those teeny surface mount parts are not for me.
I've been wanting one of these for a while. There are places online that build them and sell them. Some are mom 'n pop and others are more commercialized. But they're all still the same gnu 3d printer, just prettier or better parts on the upper end of the scale. The mom 'n pop ones tend to have renderings for their own replacement parts, excluding the metal/electronics of course as rosen380 suggested.
This is a really good kit, but I have seen other kits for $500 if you don't mind the dip in aesthetics.
If you add a metal extruder and made the XYZ controls and the tip more precise you could macgyver another replicator and just about anything else.
You should check out this item on Thingiverse:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3285
The reprap project is more oriented twoards printing copies of itself, but makerbot seems to be easier to build.
I own one that I built about a month ago. There is no surface mount soldering required in the deluxe kit. Actually there is very little soldering, in building the kit. Look at the wiki at makerbot.com and take a look at the building instructions. The only soldering is the thermistor to some wires.
After I got the bot I purchased the heated building platform, that does require surface mount soldering. I had never done it before but it really wasn't bad.
The bot CAN (and usually does) need quite a bit of tweaking to get good prints. That can take a while and sometimes gets frustrating.
I still very cool to print stuff out (even if not perfect) and designing stuff myself. It really is awesome in that sense.
Dear web admin:
You could add a trigger to your comments table. Something to the effect of:
delete from tbl_comments where comment like '%pointingtrade.com%'
Just a thought. :-) I won't mind. lol
I am waiting for an meat printer . Make a pork chop from a vat of cell growth medium
I don't understand why these things are so small, and make such small parts. I'm sure that many of the electronics and many parts could be used in a machine with twice the size (and 8 times the volume). A machine that can make objects around a cubic foot would have more practical applications. The price of larger machines shouldn't rise at the same rate as the objects it can build. I saw one of these makerbots last year, and as cool as it is, it seemed to me to be a toy that can only make tiny toys. I think you should be thinking bigger.