ShopBot Fabricam

We’ve got some guests in the shop this week…Anne Filson and Gary Rohrbacker from AtFab and Anna France from MakerMedia.. I’m collaborating with Anne and Gary on a new book called “Design for CNC” for MakerMedia, and they’re in the shop to fabricate and photograph the furniture that illustrates the projects in each chapter. …

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Fabricating and installing the MakerBot furniture

The MakerBot furniture has been in place for about a month, so it’s time to talk about the nuts and bolts of getting the parts cut, the furniture assembled, and delivered to the 21st floor of an office building in Brooklyn.

Fabrication:

Since we had pockets of varying depths to cut we couldn’t use …

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Collaborating with Designers

You may know how to cut things on your ShopBot ( or print them on your 3d printer) and feel like you just need a designer to email you drawings of the parts and pieces to be able to successfully fabricate their design. And that may be true, but communicating throughout the process will almost …

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Working on big projects…the beans need to be counted!

The MakerBot office project involves cutting 70+ sheets of expensive plywood and 100’s of unique parts, so it was important to develop a system from the start to make sure that all the pieces were cut accurately, without missing or duplicating any of them. They also involve lots of features like bevels, …

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Fabbing for MakerBot

Almost exactly a year ago, at the 2011 New York Maker Faire, our booth was near some folks from the University of Kentucky’s Design school, Anne Filson and Gary Rorbacher, that had a project called atFAB. It turns out that they were familiar with ShopBot and 100kGarages…they had actually had gotten the pieces they had …

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Reusing Designs

Although it’s fun to always be doing new things, sometimes it’s a plus to be able to reuse work that you’ve done in the past. It not only saves you time, but also gets you looking at old designs with new eyes. Here are two examples that I’ve worked on recently.

Puzzles:

5 or 6 …

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Something Simple

There are lots of times when you want to be just as clever and creative as you can be when you’re designing a project, and others when you just want something that solves the problem…something simple. Just recently I was asked to come up with some outdoor seating for the Maker Faire in Austin, so …

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A ShopBotting Dinosaur Evolves

I’ve probably been making things with a ShopBot as long as anyone, except of course for Ted. I got one of the first tools…so early in ShopBot’s history that Ted came to my shop to help put my ShopBot together!… but by the end of the first week had already cut the parts for …

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Making Stuff …

Those that know me will tell you that I can’t help much with creating fancy 3d files or things like lithophanes to cut on your ShopBot, but I have made a heck of a lot of “stuff”…things that have a somewhat practical use like boats and furniture and clocks and such. It seems like a …

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Exploring ShopBot Part Files 2 …

In the last Bill’s corner we learned how to manually create part files by typing in commands, and to automate the process using the Part File Assembler. Now I know you all agree with me that this could be pretty powerful stuff, but what can we really do with it that we can’t do just …

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