Sorry, been busy in the store. Still putting the 5th Gen through its paces and taking lots of pictures, just haven't squeezed the time in to post here. I see 250 views - feel free to comment or ask questions, we've had the thing for most of a week and are starting to get a better feel for it.

Picking up where I left off - I thought maybe the slow build was something to do with the slice settings - really high resolution, slow print speed, something like that. So we need to do it straight from makerware.

Turns out Makerware 2.2 and 2.4 (our in-house staples) aren't compatible with the 5th Gen, so we downloaded and installed the latest "Makerbot for Desktop" 3 point something. I think I remember this from previous versions, the drivers aren't properly signed or something and Windows keeps asking if I really want to continue installing at several points. It took a fairly long time to install and required babysitting to get past the prompts, but it worked just fine out of the gate, which is not something I can say about the Sunbeam Smoothieware drivers that make the Z-Morphs go.

So we load the stretchlet into the software and set it for 10% infill, 0.2mm layers, 90mm/s print speed, no raft and and slice it up. A new twist with this software is that it splits slicing and printing, unlike older versions which are a 0ne button affair. In addition, when you go to print, you don't see all the settings like in the older versions, there's a separate Settings screen that you have to save. Not too inconvenient or unintuitive, but more clicks nontheless.

Drum roll.....



One hour, no minutes and 33 seconds. Ahem. Okay, let's try some of our other standard objects...