Desk shelf

I like the desk shelf concept. It gives you a little more surface area on your desk. I've made them out of wood and plastic, but this one is all plastic. The .stl files can be found on Thingiverse.

Computer case.

I finally posted my computer case to Thingiverse.

Bot is fixed.

I had a molex plugged in wrong. Sigh. To distract you from my stupidity, I give you a picture of a Tie Interceptor that I printed in July.

'Bot down!

My newer Thing-o-Matic made a big plastic ball yesterday. The problem is that's not what it was supposed to be printing. The heated build platform stopped heating. Indeed, when you pull up the control panel, it shows the temperature at 1024 degrees. I've seen this problem before and usually it's a loose wire. I checked the wiring pretty thorough though and I even put in a new cable as the old one had some melting issues at the connector-- a common problem. Still, the temperature reads 1024. This is why I would recommend that people buy the ToM kits instead of the completed ToM. They break all the time. Building the kit gives you the experience to deal with this. In fact, they break so often, that's why I bought two. When one is down, I can run the other one so I don't feel so bad.

It might take until the weekend, but I will solve the problem. In fact, there's only so many things that it could be. I'll troubleshoot every connection and look at all the boards. I'll report back as to my solution.

Makealot's bowl

I'm a huge fan of Makealot's work. This is one of his latest creations and it is beautiful. In my opinion, it's a 3d confection that's also useful.

Much better.

This is what I was trying to print the other night when I got the mass of twine instead. This, friends & neighbors, is the corner piece of my 3d printed computer case. The top is going to rest on those little pegs and after I clean up the pieces, they will all snap together like a puzzle. I was hoping to make it large enough for a Micro ATX motherboard, but that's not going to happen with this build. Instead, it's going to be Mini ITX. It will still have more than enough horsepower to run a Makerbot.

Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

3D printing is a wonderful hobby. It is extremely satisfying to create something in your mind, express it via Sketchup or Meshlab or Autocad and then print it into reality via a Makerbot. That being said, it's not all peaches and cream. I'm working on designing and printing a custom computer case. Because the pieces are large, relatively speaking, most of them will take more than 5 hours each to print. Time is kind of the enemy when it comes to 3d printing. Anything 3 hours or less, I'm fairly comfortable that it will finish successfully. A 5 hour print, on the other hand is essentially a dice roll only helped by printing from the SD card after oiling and re-calibrating your bot. I didn't do any of those things and I ended up with this expensive ball of twine.