Sitting in it’s soon to be home in the garage As soon as the kids were in bed I queued up the Makerbot’s unboxing tutorial videos and that Replicator was out of the box and assembled. The process was amazingly smooth and simple and only took about 30 minutes, maybe less. Well done Makerbot on a user friendly experience. I …
Makerbot arrived.
No warning, no invoice, no tracking number. Just a huge box on my front door, and weeks earlier than I thought. I may not be a paying customer, but Makerbot has certainly exceeded expectations. More to come this weekend.
Everyday I’m Modelin’
I understand Makerbot has had somewhat a delay in getting Replicators out the door in time. First there’s problems filling the the massive quantity of orders fast enough. (Where’s your assembly line guys?) Then there was a problem with many of the heated beds being badly warped meaning they’ve had to do some quick design and replacement work. So what …
“The” List
People who know I’ve won ask me “What are you going to print first?” as tho I haven’t thought about it yet. Oh, I’ve thought about it. In fact I’ve made a list and I’ve categorized the items on that list as “Useful”, “Fun”, “Pretty”, and “Project”. Useful things are the things that I want to fulfill a specific need. …
PCWorld featured my chess set
Getting mentioned on Makerbot’s blog was cool, but probably inevitable. Getting noticed by Makezine was neat because I saw it in my news feed myself. I needed someone else to point out to me Gizmoto’s coverage. That was awesome. But PCWorld may be the highest profile mention to date. PCWORLD! I don’t know, that’s like… a real publication with print …
Other things I’d like to sell…
By my estimations my Makerbot is a month away. Can you smell the anticipation on my breath? I’m not a businessman by nature. I’m not opposed to the idea, it’s just that I’ve never got the hang of it. But lately I’ve been making some pretty cool things that people say they would be willing to pay for, so I’m …
SwampCastle blog
I ran across this one when organizing what I was going to print first on my makerbot. Thingiverse users lalbritton made a really cool Ideal Harmonic Transformer, which is something cool to a math nerd like me, and mentioned her blog on a post. Her designs are functional but also beautiful. Check her out.http://swampcastle.blogspot.com/I like when I find a blogger …
$20 for a 2″ robot statue?
I really want to make a post about how paying $17 to upwards to $170 for a statue of a robot, even a custom made one, is a rip off. But that’s the pitfalls of custom 3D printing. Even something simple, if you want it now, becomes prohibitively expensive. Overall I think the robot builder idea linked above is just …
Action Chess Development Part 2
You’d have to be looking pretty closely, but I’ve been updating the original Action Chess V2.x model in TinkerCad. I’ve made all the pieces more compact, managed to fit everything inside the size of a normal chess piece, but kept all the relevant connectors. I’ve also improved the artistic side of it. But I’m not uploading the updated designs to …
More relevant to me than I realized at the time
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/02/24/a-matter-of-scales-how-much-can-you-print-with-a-single-1kg-spool/ From this data I can estimate how much material cost goes into a chess set, and use that when calculating what I’ll charge for a set. Thank you makerbot! Of course there’s more than material costs to factor in. There’s the development time for the design. There’s the failed iterations. There’s wear and tear on the machine. Plus there’s …