This weekend I ran out of ABS. Thankfully, a month or two ago I predicted that this would happen and bought a spool of 3mm PLA from reprapsource.com . If you do some reading, you'll see that PLA has a lot going for it: It's biodegradable. It has virtually no problems with warping. The hot plastic smells like pancakes! Could all those things be true? Since my PLA came on a plastic spool, and that spool didn't fit in my MakerBot filament spindle , I had to improvise. I took the bottom half of my spindle out of the box and removed three of the vertical struts. That let me set the new spool on the Lazy Susan . Nice, right? Well, revision one didn't work so well. The fix was to add some sticks to extend the diameter of the base (at least until more of the filament has been used) and then to loop it through a guide above the spool so that it wouldn't catch on the sticks. Success! I'm now continuing the process of upgrading my bot by building a Z-Rider ...
programming, electronics, photography, and tinkering