I’ve been playing with my makerbot off and on but mainly adding various new bits of hardware to it. When I got the kit I ordered it with the heated build platform but at the time I wasn’t getting good enough prints out of the thing to feel it worth the effort of building and installing the thing. Once I had upgraded the print head and gotten better polymer flow rates out of it I had a go at assembling the thing. I had a few issues with the setting not being quite right it would not move sufficiently far layer by layer and then end up dragging the print head through the print. On a small print where the polymer stayed mailable it just made the print messy on longer prints where the plastic had time to harden it caused layer offset problems where the head would catch on the layer and move out of alignment.
I eventually got some settings that worked and had a go at the heated build platform and got some nice prints out of the thing. At this point I started to run low on white ABS plastic. I did have a large reel of black ABS but I had the idea to make some christmas light up trees in this fashion http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1406 and so thinking crystal like PLA would work better than black ABS ordered a reel of that. While I was ordering stuff I also figured the new Automated build platform would be worth a try if I wanted to print several of the trees out at once (the ABP is basically a heated bed with a plastic conveyer belt on top so at the end of a print it rotates the belt and the current print pops off so the machine can commence a second print).
I built the ABP and began some tests using the remaining ABS plastic. There were also a few upgrades to the host software for makerbot and in the process I lost my custom settings for skeinforge (the software that does the slice and dice of the object turning it into gcode tool paths for the makerbot to follow). So I had old problems of the head catching on layers combined an possibly exacerbated by a new problem of ABS not sticking to the belt on the ABP. I got some luck by deploying the universal cureall blue painters tape. Which stuff sticks to like glue. Now I need to try and retune my skeinforge parameters, handilly there are some new guides on how to do that linked off the makerbot blogs http://davedurant.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/configuring-skeinforge-index-to-articles/
So anyway while I seem to have done a lot of work to achieve nothing much I’m hopeful I’ll be getting better results out of the thing soon. I’ve also started playing a game of D&D with some geek club members and I figure it might be nice to print my own miniture complete with glowy LED insert, to that end I bought a bag of 10mm leds and a load of 2032 lithium cells from amazon for about 10 bucks so now all I need is to design a miniture and get the printer up to spec.
