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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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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Secondary Operations and Machine Calibration

One of the tasks at which the ShopBot excels is processing sheet materials. I love that I can slide a sheet of melamine or plywood onto the table and a few minutes later pull off a small pile of parts, ready for edgebanding and assembly. If you have done your design and programming …

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Recipe for a Successful Business Part 4

If you’ve been following our previous articles you’ll know that we have been sharing all of our secrets for creating a successful product line, marketing it to a particular group of people, packaging it so people will be falling over themselves to buy it and finally, getting the product on the internet and out to …

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Recipe for a Successful Business Part 3

Getting the word out

In the last articles we have gone from thinking about possible products all the way to fixturing your CNC equipment and then packaging and shipping. But how are your potential customers supposed to know that you sell the exact product they’ve been searching for? You’ve got to now get the …

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Recipe for a Sucessful Business #2

Last month we explored how to figure out what products would work best for starting your own small business. We talked about identifying your interests, and trying to come up with an item with broad appeal and a low price point. We discussed briefly the idea of using scraps, or lesser in demand …

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Recipe for a Successful Business Part #1

In this series of articles, I am heading in a little different direction than previous ones. In the past, I have written how I use the ShopBot to cut parts, hold them in place, and little extra gadgets, tricks, and accessories that can be added to the ShopBot. This series will give you ‘food for …

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly … Again

We’re just back from the IWF show in Atlanta. This show is the largest woodworking machinery show in the US. In the past, we’ve found it a good place to let a wide range of woodworkers see our tools, learn how they can address production needs of small shops and also suit manufacturing processes in …

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