I bought a MakerBot Replicator 2 for my family, Chirstmas 2012. It doesn't see a lot of use. Typically the things that get printed are pretty much cereal-box-t

I bought a MakerBot Replicator 2 for my family, Chirstmas 2012. It doesn't see a lot of use. Typically the things that get printed are pretty much cereal-box-toy quality and importance. The most useful thing I've printed was a toothbrush holder that I designed myself, and the most fun thing was when my daughter needed to bring in "a shape" for her kindergarten class, so we printed up a set of platonic solids. She's an aspie (yea, really) and proceeded to lecture her class... For the first few months I had a lot of trouble with it failing to print the filament wouldn't advance so it would skip a slice, and then when it would catch it would end up creating a mass of goo on the end of the print head. Turns out that there was an upgrade made available where instead of a set screw, there was an active lever holding the filiment in place to ensure contact with the feed motor. Once I had that in place, it printed far more reliably. The biggest problems I have right now are the PLA curling on large flat pieces. I would say that I do enjoy using openscad to design things. I've tried the online "move blocks around and drag and drop your way to 3d success" apps, but I just can't think that way and invariably I end up with a frustrating mess. Openscad lets you iterate with a simple declarative language. Its like turtle graphics for 3d printing...