Project:Cupcake-o-Matic

The Makerbot Cupcake CNC was Makerbot's first foray into the 3D printer kit market, and one of the first 3D printer kits on that market. The Cupcake CNC takes a lot of it's design cues from 2 sources, the initial reprap 3D printer, Darwin, and the other from the need to make it laser cut-able.

It was followed by the Thing-o-Matic which fixed many of the problems associated with the Cupcake CNC.

The Start

I bought a Cupcake CNC in September 2009. I received Cupcake 224 from batch #6. I quickly assembled it and attempted a test print all in about 24 hours. It did not work. I could not get it to extrude plastic through the MK4 Plastruder reliably, when it did extrude I could then not get it to stick to the acrylic build platform. I left it be for a couple of years annoyed with what seemed a wasted purchase until January 2012 when I bought a MK5 drive gear from KD85, the closest European distributor. I also added a heated build platform to my order to ensure the extrusion would stick to the bed.

These two upgrades allowed me to start printing reliably and I immediately started printing a new extruder to improve the MK4 plastruder. I was aiming to replace it with a stepper motor driven one so as to improve the build quality with a better model slicer such as Slic3r. I ended up printing out multiple extruder bodies as I repeatedly printed the wrong one.

One good side affect of this was that I also ended up printing out the rest of the Huxley Pro parts to match the NEMA14 extruder body. A friend of mine has suggested he may find a use for it.