With the soft opening of the Jinxbot 3D Printing Storefront, I thought I would take some time to talk about my journey so far.

How it all Began

My very first intro into 3D printing began all the way back in 2003 or so when I took an engineering class in high school. We learned a bit of CAD, with a program called IronCAD. It was a blast and I learned a lot about modeling, but the real treat was when we got to have one of our designs printed.

Will find part, take picture, and add it here.

It was a simple enough shape, but it was the genesis of a mentality that I still carry with me today. This technology can make just about anything. Fast forward to college at CalPoly SLO, and my Industrial Technology senior project. I wanted to create a product from concept to launch. It was a Vitamin Gummy Puzzle based off of M.C. Escher’s Tessellations called Puzzlers. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. But I had the most fun in the product creation phase. This was my second real exposure to Additive Manufacturing. I had to created the molds for the gummies, so I created the positives in CAD, and used my labs printers to created the master set.

After college, I bounced around from job to job until a kickstarter came out for a cheap inexpensive 3D Printer called the Micro3D. It was a blast working with it, but ultimately was more trouble then it was worth.

The Jinxbot

I decided I wanted my next printer to be a good one, so I saved up and bought a Makerbot 5th Gen. I found a great deal on Craigslist and started setting it up right away. In setting up the printer, it asked me to name it, I was born on Friday the 13th, and always liked the nickname Jinx, so I combined that with my new Makerbot, and the name Jinxbot was born.

Starting the Business

I was working in advertising at a solar company at the time and was supporting my wife as she was selling clothes on eBay. She just happened to land a steady job at Stanford University, and my company simultaneously decided to lay off half the company. If that didn’t happen, I don’t think I would have been able to say no to a paycheck and health insurance, so luckily, I didn’t have to. I had a long conversation with my wife and asked her if I could try out 3D Printing for a living, as it had always been a dream of mine to be an entrepreneur and start my own business. She agreed and gave me a year to make it happen. Jinxbot officially listed its only printer on 3D Hubs back in 2015. From there growth was slow. At first I would get a print job every two weeks or so, then every week, then every day… I eventually earned enough with that printer to buy another, then with the two, to buy four.. etc… I got good at buying used printers on craigslist and pretty soon had a small farm in my garage. I started my website Jinxbot.com and listed my printers on any Printing Hub type site I could find. Jinxbot was making money and I was able to continue printing for a living.

From Garage to Storefront

I had a pretty solid customer base at this point and had been printing professionally for a few years now. My garage was stacked with printers and I started running into capacity issues. I didnt have every printer running all the time, but I tried to keep my turnaround times as low as possible. This forced me to need enough printers to cover peak demand scenarios. Sometimes I would only have a few prints going, others I would have every printer going, and still have a queue. I am pretty good at organizing and order management so I had that as an advantage, but working in my garage was becoming problematic. Dust, moisture, and temperature fluctuations were my adversaries and they were relentless. Still I was able to put out quality prints with quick turnaround times. The other issue came from customers wanting to pick up there parts. I didnt want customers coming to my house, so I would meet them in the parking lot of the corner store a block from my house. It felt a bit shady, but hilarious at the same time. I was “dealing” prints in little plastic baggies. There had to be a better way.

My first attempt at legitimizing Jinxbot was to find a way for customers to pick up there parts without feeling like it was a drug deal. I came up with the idea to mimic an amazon locker type system using an old gym locker and some smart padlocks. But trying to find a place to put the darn thing was more trouble then creating the locker system itself… Seems like an easy enough problem to solve, but trust me, I looked into them all with no success. I had no other choice then to look for a storefront. Eventually a storefront opened up in the very parking lot that I would meet customers in originally, a block away from my house! I couldn’t believe it, so I jumped on it immediately. The size location, and rent were all perfect. But that’s when the real headaches began. A brick and mortar store is infinitely more complicated and tedious to open then a virtual store. Zoning issues, commercial tenant improvement permits and building inspections all had me at the edge of my seat, biting my nails. If anything had gone awry, my dream location for my dream business would be dashed on the rocks of reality. Thankfully with the emotional support of my wife, and a lot of perseverance and determination, I was able to open the doors to my business during a time when most business were closing down. I have now fully moved in, and my landlord even let me put my locker system out front so customers can pick up there parts at their leisure. I am continuing to grow, adding capacity and capabilities to Jinxbot. I even found a storage space that I can place even more capacity in.

This journey has had quite a few struggles, and they all felt so insurmountable at the time, but here I stand on the other side. With the storefront opening, I truly feel now that I have made my dream job a reality. And it makes me so genuinely happy that my dream job, is helping others make their dreams a reality.

Jinxbot is excited to announce that our long awaited Locker Pickup system is up and running!

What does this mean for you? Now you will be able to select JinxBox as an option when selecting your shipping/pickup option. When your order is finished we will place it inside our insulated smart locker system located right out front of our store. This will allow you to skip making a scheduled appointment to pick up your order, allowing you to collect it at your leisure.

How does it work? Check out the link below for a detailed how to!

Jinxbox Locker Pickups

What a blast it was to hang out and talk shop with David Shorey at Maker Faire! Cant wait to see what kind of shenanigans I can get into as I practice embedding different materials into my 3D Prints!

When it comes to Additive Manufacturing, or more commonly 3D Printing, there are a few that have become quite commonplace: FDM, SLA, and SLS. They stand for Fused Deposition Modeling, Stereolithography Apparatus, and Selective Laser Sintering respectively. But what are they and what are the main differences? 

FDM: Fused Deposition Modeling

In a nut shell, in FDM, you are Fusing Deposited layers of plastic together to create a Model. You can think of a robot controlled hot glue gun, but instead of glue, it is liquid hot plastic. As the plastic extrudes and comes out of the nozzle it is cooled in place, and the process repeats for the next layer, until you have your finished part.

This is by far the most inexpensive kind of 3D Printing available today and many people have these kinds of printers as a hobby. If you are at all interested in picking this up as a hobby yourself, I highly recommend starting with an FDM printer and playing around with it to get your bearings.

The plastic used in FDM printing can range from common plastics to chocolate, glass, cement, you name it. The most common type of plastics used are PLA or Poly Lactic Acid and ABS or Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene. Both are everyday plastics that you come into contact with on a daily basis. PLA is becoming more popular in recent years as it can be easily infused with other materials like wood and metal. PLA+ is an advanced version of PLA which has similar mechanical properties to ABS, and is far easier to work with. ABS has a tendency to warp and curl as it cools, and much care needs to be put into the environmental controls. ABS is also quite toxic and harsh on the environment.

SLA: Stereolithography Apparatus

Simply put, SLA printing uses lasers to cure UV Photopolymer Resin in layers that are built up to create your model. Instead of extruding hot material to extrude into place, the build platform is inverted and dipped into a bath of resin, the laser then cures layers upon layers in a pattern onto the buildplate, to create your model. There are several advantages of SLA printing over FDM printing. Accuracy is the foremost advantage. SLA printing is highly accurate with resolutions of up to 25 microns. To give you an idea, each layer printed would be 4x thinner than the width of a human hair. When printing “organic” type models with many curves, this is your best options to preserve the fidelity of you model. The main drawback to SLA printing is cost, on the range of 8-10x the prices of the same part printed with FDM.

There is a range of materials that you can print with SLA printing. Formlabs produces Standard resin in Black, Grey, White, and Clear. They also produce Tough, Durable, Flexible, and High Temp Resins, each with their own specialized characteristics.

SLS: Selective Laser Sintering

SLS is an incredibly interesting process that provides strong and durable parts that function like finished products. The technology uses a high powered laser to Sinter Nylon Polymer Powder layer after layer. What is interesting about this process is that because each layer of powder is added and sintered to the last, there is no need for any support material. This is because all of the unsintered powder acts like a giant support structure, and when the parts are finished, the powder is brushed away and lightly sandblasted.

This leaves you with intricate parts that are strong, heat resistant, biocompatible, and ready for action.

I started getting some strange z-banding on my prints, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. I had read a lot of blog posts, watched videos, and really couldn’t find anything but a small blurb buried on a support site for a different model printer that barely came close to what I was experiencing. But even that was little help because there were no pictures that went along with it. I had to really look at the whole scenario in order to fix this odd z-banding problem I was facing. To help you understand, a little backstory.

I know Makerbot got a lot of bad press back around 2012-15ish, But they really have gotten much better in terms of quality. I recently purchased my second Makerbot 5th gen second-hand from another printer friend of mine, located in Fremont, Tan3D. It was an older 5th gen, but he said he had been taking care of it, and was still producing good prints. On top of everything he gave me a great deal on it.

When I went to pick it up, I noticed that there were some globs of grease on the main lead screw and the two z-rods on either side. He said that he had been using that grease to lube the lead screw occasionally and he gave me some for the road. I hadn’t had to lube my previous machine, but I knew his was much older so I didn’t think much of it.

When I got it home I printed a few test objects and was really happy withe the results. However I noticed that the grease he put on was to high, and was not being worked into the lead screw. I took a micro fiber cloth and wiped it on the lower part of the lead screw and everything seemed fine. About two or three prints later I started getting results like in the picture below.

It wasn’t super pronounced, or even consistent for that matter, but it started getting worse. The prints would be so weak that you could just pull the bottom layer right off… I tried searching google for z-banding issues, but they all pointed toward a bent lead screw. I started to get really worried that I would have to find a replacement, and for Makerbot, that can be difficult/expensive. But every picture I saw, the z-banding was consistent throughout the print, and wavy in the sense that the layers seems to sway back and forth. Like below.

Nearly at my wits end, I decided to just buckle down and watch a test print from beginning to end. I started noticing the pattern…It seemed like the lead screw would barely move for some layers and move quite a bit for others. It would squish one layer into the previous, and almost print above the last layer for the next. So on and so on creating that pattern, and then it would decide to print normally.

The grease that the previous owner put on was the only odd factor. But I kept dismissing it as he said he had done it often. Which also didn’t exactly explain why it would just stop randomly.

The random article that I mentioned earlier did say that too much grease can affect print quality in a way that looks like z-banding, but it wasn’t direct enough to draw a correlation, but I did keep it at the back of my mind.

I was running out of ideas, so I decided to take all the grease off that the previous owner had put on. That’s when the real project began. There seemed to be gunk in a lot of places, so I made the decision to take it all apart and give it a good cleaning. I had replaced the idler pulley on my first Makerbot before in a previous article, but removing the lead screw seemed like it was going to be an even bigger chore, and it was!

I should have taken a video, but I did manage to snap a picture of the printer without its backing. Long story short, I removed the print bed carriage and the lead screw, de-greased the crap out of it with a boat load of WD40, and reassembled it (I didn’t even lose a screw!).

I was so pleased when I ran the test print and it came out clean and sharp. Like it was brand new! I went ahead and ordered some SuperLube with PTFE that Makerbot recommends for its Z18 model and applied just a tiny little bit to the lead screw only. I didn’t want the lead screw to seize from the WD40 (WD40 cleans, and de-rusts, but it is not a lubricant!).

Having pretty much fully disassembled the Makerbot 5th Gen, I feel very confident that if any other problem should arise, I will be able to handle it. I am sticking with Makerbot because they are great machines, and if you take care of them, they will take care of you! And most importantly I am happy to say that I am still getting great prints.

The End