THE INVENTABLES WORKSHOP

Lots of Inventables customers are interested in finding a shop where they can get some laser cutting done.  In this map below I am going to be adding locations where you can do laser cutting yourself or hire a company to do it for you in Chicago.  I'll be doing more cities soon.  If you know of a place I should add please comment at the bottom and I'll add it to the map.

Green pins represent places where you pay for laser cutting as a service
Blue pins represent places where the laser cutters are a communal tool typically as part of a membership to the space.


View Laser Cutting in Chicago in a larger map

I just got back from the factory with some exciting news to report...the Full and Premium Kits from Shapeoko batch #1 have started shipping!  Below is a photo I took out on the dock right as I was leaving.  The boxes were stacked up waiting for the UPS truck to come.  You'll notice we've added the "Handle with Care" stickers in the hopes that UPS doesn't try to throw them like a football.

From the outside the kits look the same as the Mechanical kits but the inside is much different.

Here's a small taste of what you'll find inside.  The first thing is everyone got a power supply that works from 100v - 240v.  This made it possible for the same power supply to be used in every country.

We did a little research on the power plugs in each country and bought the appropriate plugs for everyone.  In the event that you take your machine to a different country or the place you are plugging in doesn't use the national standard we used standard computer power ca…

Over the last few weeks the team at Inventables has been working hard on the open source Shapeoko CNC Mill kits.  It has been one of the most exhilarating experiences in our history.  We closed the first Shapeoko campaign on April 23rd and promised the first batch of Shapeokos would ship within 60 days or by June 22nd.  

Today is June 12th and we're happy to report the first wave of shipments went out early!  
Let's start at the beginning and walk through how we got here.  First, Edward Ford the inventor of the Shapeoko came over to our office to show us his machine.  We were pretty excited and decided to work together to bring it to market with three version Mechanical, Full, and Premium.  The Mechanical kit is for experts that need the mechanical hardware but wanted to add their own stepper motors, Arduino, motor controllers, wires, power supply, and cables that you need to make the machine run.  The Full Kit was intended for folks that just want to follow the instructions …

First I want to thank everyone for making the first MakerSlide production run possible.  The open source hardware community, Bart Dring, and the active community over at Buildlog have exceed even our greatest expectations for MakerSlide.
We closed the orders for the first MakerSlide production run on  April 23rd and promised everyone that ordered that we would ship them within 45 days.  For those of you that don't know about MakerSlide it is an open source linear extrusion that combines a linear railing system with structural support.  The MakerSlide design was invented by Bart Dring. Here's what it looks like...


Now for the update.  We had a few bumps in the road during production.  The original die that we thought we could use to run the extrusion broke so we had to have a new die manufactured.  As you can see on the diagram above there is a new and improved design that makes the extrusion easier to run through the die.  The top cross section uses one less rib.  Bart had so…