MakerBot Replicator 2 has arrived
As I mentioned previously, I sold my Thing-O-Matic and was waiting for it’s replacement. Well, the Replicator 2 arrived and I’ve been printing stuff like crazy with it. Unlike the Thing-O-Matic, this printer comes (nearly) fully assembled so I was up and running almost immediately.
MakerBot already did a great unboxing video so I won’t:
Only major difference was what looks like masking tape in the video that holds the extruder in place for shipping was replaced with super beefy zip ties that were a pain to remove…just not quite enough room to get a sharp blade under some of them and I ended up scratching the metal frame a little in the process.
The first thing I printed was the stretchlet that was on the SD card as a sample print.
It printed beautifully and quickly:
I then printed a Companion Cube box:
and was able to print the grided globe:
These prints turned out great but it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be. Levelling the bed was trickier than expected, despite the new 3 point levelling system. I’m also not convinced that MakerWare is working correctly as anything I try to prepare using the high quality option seems to fail (everything was printed at the medium quality mode, using Miracle Grue). It’s likely due to having a pre-existing installation of Replicator G (and Skeinforge), but I’ll start with a clean slate and see if things improve.
I’m about to pack it up and take it to our 3d printing club’s build day so I’m sure I’ll have more to post about after we spend the day working with it.
I’ll be posting the printing output in my Replicator 2 set on Flickr if you want to follow along:
Thanks so much for posting photos of your prints. It’s nice to see the quality of the prints up close. I’ve got a Replicator 2 on order that should be shipping any day. I’d love to see more of your prints and video.