First, thank you for your witty, plentiful and creative responses!! The perfect answer for the photo would have been something along the lines of...a "super nice swiss CNC lathe machining awesome MakerGear parts!"  But a rather straight forward guess of 'CNC lathe' or 'CNC machine' was sufficient...


[The heater barrels in this photo were being machined when I took the contest photo. Nozzles and other very high quality parts are in the process of being machined and will be arriving soon...]

But, as fate would have it, we have multiple winners. The first correct answer was privately messaged to me just minutes into the contest. I asked that the guess be posted publicly and during the interim another acceptable answer was submitted. The first two winners are Matt LaBerge and Devlin Thyne. A few days later a really spot-on, insightful guess was submitted by Brian Bartlow (though, Brian, the photo was not rotated). Now there are three winners! As a result we doubled the prize and split it three ways! That's $16.67 per person :) There were several very creative and entertaining guesses...my favorite was that we "made our own PLA"!! Congrats to Sikko! ($10 award) The next time you place an order just remind us...so that we apply the award!!

This contest was just a teaser! The real contest will be announced soon...

Cool stuff is coming! Stay tuned... 

Edit: BTW - that extruder with the green 4042D gears and black 4032D body is a nema 17 stepper extruder aka a Wade. It is the rage on the Mendel side of things. We're bringing it to the CupCake crowd...