Building a MakerBot - Table of Contents

My first 3D (successful) print!

I recently decided to purchase my first 3D Printer.  I found that the documentation on the various providers web sites was a little bit lacking in detail and clarity.  I finally chose to buy a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic.  The MBI web resources are great, but some steps were explained in perfect detail with lots of good photos, while others were outdated an applied to older versions.  I had to dig through comments and various other links to find everything I needed to assemble my printer.
In an effort to streamline this process I documented my journey and will hopefully make the process slightly easier for the next assembler.
The following instructions apply to the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic (TOM) with MK7 StepStruder.

Building a MakerBot - Setup and Calibration

Following the installation of the electronics, continue on to the setup and calibration documents found here: http://wiki.makerbot.com/thingomatic-doc:how-to-print

Leveling the Build Platform
I struggled to level my HBP.  It was out by around 3 mm from the front to the back of the platform.  I ended up printing some thumb wheels that made leveling the platform much easier.  A level HBP makes raftless printing much easier.

Align X and Y Axis
The self-aligning bearings on the X and Y axis need a little bit of encouragement to "self align".  Check out the video below for a great demo of how to encourage things along.

Building a MakerBot - Testing

The next step is testing all of the various elements:
http://wiki.makerbot.com/thingomatic-doc:testing-your-bot

Extruder Head

Try removing one metal spacer

The filament should be loaded into the hole on the right for a standard MK7 build.  Once you have warmed up your extruder as per the testing instructions, and your extruder head does not appear to feed you may need to remove one of the small metal washers from the delrin plunger.  The instructions advise using three, but that may not provide enough clearance for the filament to feed properly.
Alternatively, instead of removing the washer, you can try Jonathan Little's solution:

Eventually what I got to work was to sharpen the ABS tip and also turn up the speed of the motor to about 20 or 30.  For whatever reason that worked for me even with the 3rd washer.  (I will admit I was trying to avoid taking the thing back apart, so it was sort of luck...) 

On my side, I thought things were working pretty well here initially.  I got the calibration cube to print pretty quickly.  I was totally shocked but it looked cool.  I  then tried the whistle, which crashed because (I think) I had it on a table that was shaking, so the half-whistle came loose from the HBP.  Once I fixed that the whistle worked and looked pretty good.  

He goes on to warn that this may cause jams:

After that, today I got ambitious and tried to print the "screwless cube gears" off thingiverse.  (I saw this at our hackerspace and it was a pretty awesome demo.)  I got the base and two gears to print very nicely... then the next gear broke loose from the HBP and crashed... and the MK7 stopped feeding.  It looks like the mk7 is jammed up pretty good.  So I've spent the last couple of hours trying to get that fixed...  ugh...  I thought i got most of it out with a drill bit, but it still doesn't work, so I guess I have to try some acetone or something...

Building a MakerBot - Electronics Installation

The electronics installation is probably the section that is the most difficult to follow as it has not been updated to reflect the MK7 StepStruder.

1/4" spacers made from a bic pen

For the most part, follow the instructions as they are stated.  In the following sections I have documented some of the problems that I have run into and how I solved them.  I suggest reading ALL of this page before proceeding.
As per the instructions, install and interconnect the boards, route the wires then hook up everything. 

Building a MakerBot - Body Assembly

There are only a few things to watch out for while assembling the body while following the basic instructions.

This is an excellent time to attach the cable!

• Y-Motor Installation - you may need to use M3x10 bolts depending on your stepper motor.  Some people have had issues with the M3x12 bolts being too long
• Z-Backstop Switch - attach the cable before installing the back wall of the makerbot.  Take care to keep the cable out of the way durring the rest of the assembly process.  Attaching the cable later is very difficult.
• MK7 StepStruder Installation - read the points below, then follow these instructions: http://www.makerbot.com/docs/stepstruder-mk7-assembly/
• Check the length of the thermometer wires before proceeding!  If they are too short, the recommended installation location will not work.
• After attaching the safety cutoff board to the Z-Stage, attach the thermometer and heater core cables as shown.  
• Then, attach the E-Cutoff cable.  Label the free end and pass it through the hole in the back right corner of the middle plate. 
• Attach about 60 cm of red and black hookup wire to the 12V port and thread the wire down through the back right hole as well.
• You will need to revisit the MK7 instructions again during the electronics installation step.
• Use a permanent marker and tape to label each cable end as you thread it into the base.  This will make the hookup much easier and trouble shooting more sane.

<- Safety Cutoff Assembly | Electronics Installation ->

Table of Contents

Building a MakerBot - Safety Cutoff

Extra wire added to thermometer

Building the safety cutoff takes some basic soldering skills, but is very quick and easy to do.  Pay close attention to the positions of each resistor on the circuit board.
Hooking up the thermometer and heater core are also fairly easy.
Before drilling the holes to mount the safety cutoff board on the z-stage, be sure to check the length of the wires on the black thermometer (not the thermocouple).  My wires were too short to reach the board in the suggested mounting position.  You can mount the board closer to the front of the stage as needed.

Unfortunately, my wires were entirely too short for any mounting position and I had to add about 10cm of 22 gauge braided hook up wire.

<- StepStruder Assembly | Body Assembly ->

Table of Contents

Building a MakerBot - StepStruder Assembly

Thermocouple bead wrapped in kapton tape

The StepStruder MK7 instructions are very well documented and easy to follow.
It should be noted that the thermocouple is packaged in the Generation 4 Electronics bag instead of in the Mk7 box.  It is shipped in a small wax-paper envelope.  The end with the small metallic bead should be folded into a piece of kapton tape to electrically insulate it from the extruder head.
There is some discussion about grounding the heater core.  Apparently it is not unheard of for a heater resistor to blow out.  In this instance, if the thermocouple has broken through its kapton tape shell, 12V will be routed through the thermocouple and into the stepstruder control board subsequently frying it.
I plan to setup and calibrate my TOM, then add a grounding wire from the extruder plate to the power supply.
Update 12 February
Adding the ground wire works just fine, but it is critical that the thermocouple is properly insulated from the heater block.  If the thermocouple breaks through the kapton insulation and the heater is grounded, some very strange readings will be reported.  Insulate that thermocouple well!
The best solution I've come up with so far is to put a piece of kapton tape directly on the heater block, double wrap the thermocouple and then put a layer of tape over the washer.  Between the six layers of tape, the thermocouple appears to be slightly better insulated.

<- Build Platform Assembly | Safety Cutoff ->

Table of Contents

Building a MakerBot - Build Platform Assembly Part 2

The Build platform is where the models will actually be produced.  I have chosen to use the heated aluminum surface (see Built Platform - Part 1 for more information on alternatives).    There are three segments to the build platform assembly, one for each axis.

Building a MakerBot - Build Platform Assembly Part 1

After finishing the preparation work, the next step in assembly the Thing-O-Matic is assembling the build stage.  This is where the ABS will actually be extruded to.  There are three available options assembling the build platform:

1. Acrylic Build Surface - the original build surface
2. Heated Build Surface - the largest usable build surface
• Heated Build Surface w/ Aluminum Plate - an even larger build surface
3. Heated Automated Build Surface - turn your Thing-O-Matic into a small factory

Each option has a fair number of pros and cons associated with it.  There are two sets of instructions over at MakerBot that detail the different options: Original Instructions, Instructions for Educators.

The instructions do not detail the finer points in making this choice, however.  After reading up on the forums and poking around a bit, I compiled this list of pros and cons for each choice.

Building a MakerBot - Preperation

My MakerBot finally arrived on Thursday!  Actually, it appears it's been languishing over at the post office, but they forgot to tell me about it.  Check out my previous post about how I chose the MakerBot Thing-O-Mattic.
There are many, many steps in the construction of this beast and in a few places, the documentation over at MakerBot leaves a little to be desired in some places.  I'm endeavoring to supplement the official documentation.

If You're Thinking of Calling

Dear USA Friends,
Please feel free to call us on our skype line.  If you're in the USA, it should cost you only as much as a phone call to someone in Denver.  That means if you are calling from your mobile, it should only cost you minutes, and a phone call from a land line should be exactly the same price as calling a Dominos Pizza in Denver CO.  If you need the number, drop us an email.
If the time difference is wigging you out (I always miscalculate the wrong way), try these hand-dandy clocks after the jump to figure out if you'll be waking us up at 2:00 am.

Stripping Mime Attachments from Email using Procmail and Perl

I've been creating local backups of my email for ages.  Recently I noticed that each year my email archives more than quadruple  in size.  I went from a 3 meg zipped archive in 2003 to a 15 meg zipped archive in 2004.  That's not a huge increase, but then between 2004 and 2011, the archives quickly shot up to over 300 megs.
After a bit of digging around in my mail archives it was pretty obvious that it wasn't the text that was sucking up all the space, but rather all the attachments that are fired around.
While it's nice to look at the baby pictures, I don't need to save a copy on both Google and on my local backup.  I use fetchmail to pop my email from Gmail and procmail to handle the actual delivery.  Procmail is a hold-over from when I had school and hotmail accounts that simply piled up with spam.  Using a combination of spam-bayes and procmail I could choke off a bit of that spam.  Since I switched to Gmail, my spam load has dropped to the point that procmail just runs quietly in the background delivering everything into mail archives that I hardly ever look at these days.
After a bit of research, I came across a perl script by Mike Leonetti.  It was meant to work with sendmail and do a few extra filtering tasks that I didn't need so I tweaked it to be a bit simpler and work with procmail.  It quietly removes any file types attached to email specified in ~/procmail/filter_attachments, substitues some text to indicate where the attachments used to live and then passes the mail on to be delivered.
I should mention that Mike was tremendously helpful in debugging and making suggestions when I couldn't get my tweaked version to work.  He's a great guy!
After the jump you can find the procmail recipe and the perl script.   Happy stripping!