Printer Enclosure.

[shipto]

For my cloned i3 or at least thats what I intended but I got to the stage you see it in the picture and thought "hang on I can make that into a new printer" and it just so happens I have a big bit of 10mm aluminium that I rescued from the scrap bin ages ago thats just the right size for it apart from being round  . So thats gone to a friendly machinist to cut the top bit that will house the X and Y axis's. It will be a corexy type printer which at least to start will be made with mostly stuff I have lying around the workshop until I can get the funds to upgrade as I go along eventually even some tool changing heads 

[picclock]

FWIW
I tried a printer enclosure similar to your picture with the sides and top made of fibreglass sheet. It was always a disappointment in that it did little for the warping/distortion that I encountered.

I then found out some further information about Prusa. Allegedly his print rooms are kept at a very high temperature, around 28-30C.

So in a final attempt to resolve the warping issues I constructed an enclosure with foam insulation board, the type with silver foil on both sides, stuck together with silicone sealant. This easily reaches 30c with just the waste heat from the bed. I leave the door open a bit if it looks like getting too hot.

The print quality, and strength is amazingly good using this technique. Even printing in a garage at 0C recently the resulting prints were outstanding. (Marlin blew up with lowtemp but its fixable by using a hot air gun on the bed for a few minutes prior to a restart)

This sort of leads me to the conclusion that it is not the drafts which cause the problem but the ambient temperature at which the print is being made. It may be a combination of both, but for me the major effect was ambient print temperature.

Hope this helps

Best Regards

picclock

[WeldingRod]

My printer enclosure runs well above ambient and I found that helped me a lot.  My first one had a thermostatically controlled lightbulb to regulate the temperature, as the small bed didnt heat things up enough.
In a perfect world, you want the enclosure really hot: just a bit below the softening temperature.  This means all the motors and brains need to be outside,  of course  ;-)

Sent from my SM-G892A using Tapatalk

[shipto]

I haven't got around to working out heating for this yet but I will be doing it, probably something independant of the printer controller itself and only the Z axis steppers will actually be in the warm area although if they have problems it probably wont be too hard to mount those under the bottom of it too.
Anyway I have made some progress with this printer the aluminium top came back and isn't bad seeing as its just salvaged from one of our impellers at work, it has one or two stray holes left behind but they will not get in the way at all and I have also got quite a bit of the printed mounts sorted. In the picture there is one mistake circled because I forgot that I need 2 idlers on each of these.