I built this yesterday
Originally shared by Daniel Schulte
Yesterday I built a case for my printer from acrylic to reduce the heating time when printing ABS and also not heating the room when printing. The corner brackets are printed from ABS as well.
At the top I drilled a hole to measure the air temperature with my multimeter. At the moment I am feeding the filament from the bottom, as I have nothing to use as a Bowden tube to get it through the acrylic without bending it to much.
I am currently planning version 2 which will be made with wood as this version is rather floppy and not as stable as I would like.
Looks good to me. I have a question that is off topic somewhat so if you do not like to answer it here i understand. How hard is it to square that machine and keep it square?
@Wayne_Friedt I guess you mean how hard it is to keep the printer square. It was relatively easy as I had a laser cut ruler with indentations at the required lengths so I just had to use that to square the frame. I also used a square to keep the angles orthogonal.
@3dpod_3D_Printing_Se My platform is heated, it’s a “normal” PCB heater with an aluminium heat spreader on top and on top of that is a glass plate with kapton tape for printing on
@Daniel_Schulte Thanks for the answer.
@3dpod_3D_Printing_Se After about 2 hours of the bed heater nearly being constanly on the interior temperature stabilised at about 40°C. If you are concerned about it getting too hot you could try adding a slow moving fan (120 mm maybe) and lead a small gap between the floor and the enclosure so the air can circulate but not cool off too much. Notice the gap where the case meets the table in the picture.
I am planned to build one. My printer is a RepRapPro mono, and the triangular shape has always stopped to proceed, since I wanted a nice triangular box instead of a cubic one. Moreover I understand that it would be better to have the motors and electronic out of the enclosure, so I am still trying to draw a prototype, that unfortunately, would require to unassemble the printer and do some modifications to have the motors out.
The matter of the temperature: I read some concerns about the fact that the temperature around 50/60/70 (that would be more or less the one of the heather bed) could decrease the mechanical resistance of the printed PLA parts of the printer and cause erratic print and un-tuning.
For this I was thinking about molding the key parts with silicone and create some plaster mould from a mixture of dentist plaster and vinavyl glue to increase the stress resistance.
In addition I planned to have a hole on the top with a suction fan, connected to a flexible air tube that fits into a hole on the window glass to expel toxic fumes from ABS & nylon.
The usage of this could drop the temperature inside the box, so creating moulded plaster parts may not be necessary.
