Hello world, so I’ve been working very hard at getting my most awesome MakerBot working. It’s been a patience invoking venture and also extremely educational. The MakerBot employs some rather brilliant little tricks that make it simple, strong and friggin cheap. It’s a great gadget to have, though it’s definitely NOT for those who want everything now and aren’t capable of taking their time to do the job correctly.

Meet My Mod

So, in trying to get my MakerBot rockin, I’ve had to debug some stuff in my assembly. The instructions given on assembly are outstanding considering how much stuff you need to do to build one. That said, they’re not flawlessly exhaustive either – and this isn’t yet an exact science. I found myself frustrated by the positioning of the circuit board (I’ll just call it a PCB for now) positioned on the thing that outputs the plastic (Plastruder/RepRap). As you can see in my included photos, I’ve moved the PCB off to the side and flipped it behind the Plastruder.

Yes, it’s awesome

So as you can probably tell I love this mod because now I can quite easily see the plastic as it moves through. I can see little (or rather massive) teeth marks in the plastic due to contact with the gear on the motor that pulls it through.. So I can watch those marks move down in to the heater barrel – this has been helpful for me in trying to decide if some other printing problems I’ve been having have been due to any of a number of factors that no long include questioning if it’s actually feeding in more plastic..

Wanna see more?

You can check out more of this stuff here