MakerBot Industries

Should one avoid painting the Y stage assembly wooden parts? I painted the frame of the printer in an earlier stage, but was wondering about these parts too… Will painting them detract from building the stage (inserting magnets) or the efficacy of the printer?

This first picture of the parts needed shows 12 screws and nuts, but the text says only 6 are needed, and this seemed correct when I built the part. Would be nice to update the picture.

I think the highlighted text should be changed.

From:

Make sure the magnets on the Y stage are flush with the top of the build platform.

To:

Make sure the magnets on the Y stage are flush with the top of the Y stage

Rather than "Use a small tool to push the magnets all the way to bottom of their holes", I did this

• Set up my stack of 10 magnets, keeping the orienting nut on one side
• Push 5 of the magnets into the top of the Y Stage, keeping them flush with the top
• FLIP the orienting nut to the other side of the stack
• Push the remaining magnets into the bottom of the build platform, keeping them flush with the bottom

This way it's easy to make them flush and I don't have to "push them all the way to the bottom."

You can of course make your acrylic stage easier to level with the "instant platform adjustment" hack ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4741 ) Put the acrylic stage onto the Y platform sideways,
( that is, so the side holes in the platform don't line up with the side holes on the plywood stage ).
Now you can drill an extra hole in the acrylic build platform to give yourself an X-direction siting post, as shown here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/glantriff/5251886780/ ) and here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/glantriff/5251886780/ ). Use the hole in the plywood stage as a template to make sure it's centered.

This makes it easy to center the plastruder head in X and Y on the build platform just by lining the screws up with the tip of the hot end. I found an English 7/64 drill bit gave me a hole just big enough to thread a #2 cap screw into — I found a couple of the short ( 5mm) screws shipped for motor mounts were
sufficient.