I am not surprised that IMakr are doing this, and to be quite honest, I am very surprised that my local Makerbot vendor has not yet done the same. The only reason I can think of is that they have not sold that many Makerbot fifth gen printers yet, so they are just beginning to experience the pressure from their customers.

I am surprised that Makerbot Industries have not stepped up and been more proactive. The only way I see them dealing with this where they might get out on top is to admit that the fifth gen was a disaster and start to work really hard to make sure their customers are satisfied. This is what separates good companies from the bad ones -- the good ones focus on the customer and when they make mistakes they do right by the customer even if it costs them money. Because the alternative here is that the Makerbot brand is irreparably tarnished and Stratasys will have pissed away hundreds of millions of dollars on what is about to become a toxic brand.

I think this is in the process of happening. Pretty much everyone I know who is in some way involved in 3D printing, be it on professional systems or as a hobbyist, is now deeply skeptical about Makerbot Industries -- and by extension: Stratasys. You could not give away a fifth gen Makerbot to most of the people in the know. (I know, I just asked a hackerspace if they wanted one of our fifth gens and they didn't even want to waste space on it).


One way they could resolve this would be to offer ALL their fifth gen customers to trade in their product for Replicator 2 printers, which are actually pretty good machines. Another way they could deal with this is to a) provide multiple extruders with each printer (including the ones they have already sold), and b) just allow people to service them themselves and make sure the spare parts and instructions on how to service them are available. Of course, this won't fix the host of other problems the machines have, but it would be a show of good faith from Makerbot Industries.

Because right now, all people see is an arrogant company that has made a defective product and who are not ready to stand by it and who are not doing anything to fix the situation. Nobody wants to do business with a company that does not stand by their product.


I'm still in the process of trying to work out how to get the Replicator 5 gen to work with Makerbot Industries and I have made quite an effort to allow them room to fix things, but I am not seeing convincing efforts from Makerbot's side. I've held off blogging about my experiences thus far in order to give them a chance to put things in order, but I've realized that I might be doing others a disservice by not reporting on my experiences as they unfold.

Either way I have been thinking about writing up a more comprehensive article and offer it to the membership magazine of one of the major engineering organizations in the country I live. Because I think that if people's first exposure to 3D printing leaves them with printers that are broken and which they cannot possibly fix themselves, that is going to turn a lot of people away from 3D printing.