Pleasant Hardware’s blog deals with the nuts and bolts of 3D printing, and recently they’ve been doing experiments with their MakerBot. One of the experiments involves printing “without a raft”. The raft is that cross-hatch base layer used to isolate the object from the build platform itself.
Removing the raft obviously saves wasted material, but also simplifies the finishing process since you don’t need to shave the raft off your shiny object.
We are truly encouraged by this type of activity; not so much because we have another iPod dock printed, but because it represents something very important: home-based 3D printing is slowly being tuned by not only Pleasant Hardware, but by many others too. The crowd is improving MakerBot, little by little.
Where will we be in a year?
Source: fabbaloo.com