It's fitting that the newest 3D printer from Brooklyn's MakerBot Industries is called the Replicator. When we visited their studio, right there in the front of the shop was a MakerBot... built by a Makerbot.
And it wasn't even built by them. All of the machine designs that built that machine are made available to the public through the company's open source platform, Thingiverse, so a dedicated fan was able to make it themselves using a MakerBot and ended up trading it to the company for another MakerBot.
The Replicator, the second machine the company has released, was just announced in January and it will be interesting to see what kind of designs the open source MakerBot community will be able to come up with and share. The new Replicator added a second color to the machine and makes larger prints, now up to the size of a loaf of bread.
MakerBot isn't the first 3D manufacturer, but with the Replicator going for $1,750, they are the first to set the price point for your average consumer, opening up the technology to whole new crowd.
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