Stepper Motor Bypass for Makerbots (ALL) (Q42840)

Sometimes you want to be able to quickly disable a stepper without having to shut down your bot to unplug it. This is especially useful - although by no means limited to - when using a stepper extruder. It's nice to be able to flip a switch and spin your gears by hand. Photos from my DUAL-STEPPER setup ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6362 ); this is connected to allow me to turn off the second stepper and only use one. I built it so I could do some tests and see what difference the second stepper makes. You don't need to be using dual steppers for this to be useful for you, though. Thanks to Kliment (and everyone) on #reprap IRC Freenode for the idea. There's not any files or printed parts required to do this, but just for fun I designed a parametric switch cover to use for the purpose.