One of the key reasons I haven't ponied up for a MakerBot yet is because I'm still not sure it will be able to produce the types of things I specifically would like to make. It would be neat if they had some sort of "try before you buy" scheme where you could e-mail them plans and get the part back in the mail for a fee, to see if it met your expectations.

Until something like that develops, one blog I've found that makes for interesting reading is Brendan Dawes' Everything I Make with my MakerBot, whereby he documents his projects dating back to December of 2010, when he first bought the machine.

Although technically an artist and DJ, Dawes has enough ID in his bones to hint at what things you, as an industrial designer, would probably come up with if you had a MakerBot lying around the house. Thus we see things like cable wraps, a bicycle mount for a camera, a notebook writing utensil holder perfectly modified to store his preferred type of pencil, a modular desktop organizer system, and more.

Also informative is that he shows us his failures as well as his successes, revealing miscalculated parts and botched jobs resulting from a particular bolt on the machine not being tight enough. As I know I'd produce my fair share of errors, it's illuminating to see what can go wrong and how you can take steps to avoid it.

As IDers we're constantly looking at things and thinking "Jeez, if I only had something shaped like [this] then I could use it for [that.]" Dawes' blog really drives home that he continually has thoughts like these, and is able to quickly turn those into a reality.