Joe’s Makerbot will now be Joe’s 3D Workbench

Joe’s Makerbot is now Joe’s 3D Workbench. http://joes3dworkbench.blogspot.com/ This has been a long time coming. I avoided it for many technical reasons, but I now feel it’s time. Joe’s Makerbot (this blog) will remain with it’s history and posts, but I will no longer be updating it. From now on all posts related to making, designing, and teaching will be on …

Testing 3D Printed Dice Fairness – New Hollow Dice

Using the information gathered last time I modified a dice I made in tinkercad way back when and made a die that I figured would be sufficiently fair. Hollow like before this die has totally sharp edges. But because I can’t leave well enough alone I made another that had flat corners, or “truncated” to use a geometric term. After …

Testing 3D printed dice fairness – Chi-Square Data

So last time I explored testing if 3D printed dice can be considered balanced and the result was a resounding… oh, there’s a proper way of doing this. It’s called the Pearson’s chi-square test. The basic idea is roll the dice 5 times the number of sides you have, tally up the number of times each side shows up, then …

Testing 3D printed dice fairness

It’s been a question on my mind for a while whether a 3D printed die can be fair and balanced? The reality is that the dice you buy aren’t necessarily fair, so making a 3D printed dice fair could actually be an advantage. For a while I wanted to build a clever machine to automatically test dice, but that’s been …

New Makerware first impression

Big news, there’s a new version of Makerware out. When I decided to adopt Makerware as much as possible I’ve only found a few little issues. Just last week I found another one, a model that sliced really strange even tho it looked fine in the software. So I’ve got a lot of tests to run. The first thing I …

How small can text print?

The soap stamp thing has been doing well. Someone wanted some text in a 10 point Times New Roman font on their stamp and I knew that wouldn’t work, but I didn’t know what point font Times New Roman would work. So I decided to do some tests and make something to make the point. At the top is 8 …

Building a sacrificial tower to fix your prints.

DutchMogul has done it again. I’m loving printing his latest board game, Breach. But I ran into a problem with the Star Goddess that I’ve seen before with ABS when narrow layers printed in isolation melt together. It’s even more pronounced when I print the handle for my soap stamps. It doesn’t happen if there’s something else the same height printing …

Stress test? Pshaw

TurnRock’s Super Stress Test is designed to push the limits of what home 3D printing can do… theoretically. In reality this was hardly a test at all for my Makerbot. I know I keep lauding it here, but I am really impress with the small details that MakerWare handles so well. So to really stress the test I reprinted the …

A second shot at a Modibot

After my last go Wayne Loosey actually contacted me and asked if I’d like to test a few accessories for modibots on my next go. Well that motivated me to give this another shot. Did a couple of things different this time: Scaled everything to 130%. This was to hopefully increase wall thickness and fudge the tolerances. Mostly successful, except …

Home printing a Modibot

I’ve mentioned Wayne Losey’s Modibot before (and subsequent rantings about using 3D printing for manufacture). The basic “Mo” Modibot is available for download on 3DBurrito. So how well does a model created for SLS printers to use as little material hold up when printing on a home 3D printer? The final verdict is this is as challenging a print as …