OK I’m building a 3d printer with bed dimension of a minimum 200x400mm and I’m wondering if it would be better to relay two 200x200mm heated beds together or do a diy kapton tape heater. Anyone have thoughts on this?
@Thomas_Sanladerer has a Mendel 90 built as you described. He started with 2 heater pcbs but I think he is now doing half the bed on at a time.
What ever you do, in the end you will probably only use half the bed for most prints, so being able to heat half of the bed.
@Camerin_hahn well I eventually plan to be printing large pieces for other projects and just wanted to know which is better. But 2 PCBs relayed would work well?
You can get 200mm square pcb heatbeds from China mad cheap. That’s a great start.
I’ve been sourcing larger heaters in the last few weeks - there are companies that will do a “1-2 piece sample quantity” for you, sure, but it will be expensive.
Go to Lowe’s and have them cut the glass to size or get a piece of glass from Home Depot and do it yourself, kapton tape the thermistor to the glass right in the middle, and then put the 2 heaters size by side.
You may need a relay as a ramps board can’t handle 2 heaters worth of current through one mosfet, but a 600w or higher PSU should have enough juice for both.
Don’t do that. The best thing you could do is go get a piece of aluminum cut to the size you want. I used 1/8 inch or about 3 mm. Then you can go and get a heater pad to put under it that is custom sized. I believe @Thomas_Sanladerer has a video on heater pads that would help. Then you could run kapton on top of the aluminum if you want and you could also use an inductive sensor for autoleveling. This is the setup that I use minus the heated bed option and it works flawlessly.
@Griffin_Paquette - That’s fair. I’m currently using a 200x200 or 200x300 heaters that warm a 12x12 piece of alum (this is the structural component of the bed that is mounted) and then glass clipped on top of that.
Takes a long while to heat up though.
What I’m looking to do is go: alum, cork (insulator), custom 10"x12" silicone heater, 10"x12" piece of glass.
Not having to heat the alum will drastically speed up initial hearing.
@raykholo I don’t know too much about the heater pads aside from I know that they work fairly well as aluminum is more conductive to heat than glass. You might be better off finding either a larger pad or one that has a higher wattage to get it to heat faster. But I like that I’m not the only one doing it haha.
If your bed is stationary, i’d consider a silicone heater. You can get the any size you want, with or without termistor.
Their weight might require slower prints when using moving beds…
Check @Thomas_Sanladerer YouTube channel. His video on heated beds is what you want, he is speaking from experience on a 200x400 mm bed (and he has allot of knowledge in the area)
I have checked out the silicone heaters but I want to build with what I’ve used for now so I went and bought two 200mm^2 PCB heaters. I plan on having a bed lift with CoreXY. I’ll definitely check out his channel to learn more.
Then, you may want to look me up on thingiverse, i posted my corexy serup and yes, it uses a silicone heater…
User: jayftee
@Jean-Francois_Talbot That I’ll definitely do. I plan on making more and testing which ones work best for me.
2 heated beds. That way you could heat up only one if you want. Most parts won’t take up that large of a print area