Inspired by the cantilevered Z stages of the Thing-O-Matic and Ultimaker I designed this upgrade for the Makerbot Cupcake CNC. It should be possible to get 140mm of z travel with a standard x/y stage.

I've designed it to fit a standard reprap extruder. There's room for any extruder, the mounting holes for the makerbot extruder are just a bit too wide.

In addition to a bunch of m3 nuts and bolts you will need a few bits of new hardware: 2 x 268mm lengths of 8mm smooth rod, 3 x LM8UU linear bearings, and an M8 Coupler. You will also need to print one of thingiverse.com/thing:9622 to couple your z motor to the z rod. For the z rod I just hacked down one of my z rods to 185mm.

You also need a popsicle stick, an m3 x 30 bolt (fully threaded) and a printed z-endstop-adjuster part.

If there is sufficient interest I've been pondering making an upgrade kit available.

This little doodad mounts to the bottom plate of the y carriage and sticks down so that you can mount your y endstop on the lower frame rail.

A simple method for mounting RAMPs electronics to your Mendel printer.

These little bits of plastic will let you mount sheet metal endstop flags and then adjust them with as needed.

This little plate will let you mount a RepRap extruder to your MakerBot.

File updated: fixed back line segment.

Make sure to properly feed your MakerBot else it might get angry. This laser-cuttable feed spool will make the job easier.

Updated:
- Widened the base to make it more tolerant of skew
- Reduced the inner splines diameter to make it easier to load filament.

I made a Sketchup model of the MakerBot so I could test out some paint schemes.

cupcake.skp consists of all of the 5mm laser cut parts from Batch 3-4, with a slight tweak to remove the tape dispenser.

cupcake-xy.skp has the all of the above plus the X/Y stages and all the rods. Each part is created as a component and then grouped logically. The display style is also tweaked slightly to speed rendering and look a little more realistic.