Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

Nearly finished my build chamber v2. Here's a photo of it alongside v1, which is en route to the recycling.

The new housing is made of 3/4" chipboard, sealed all round using silicone, with a 'double glazed' acrylic viewing window and an access hatch. It's got built in LED lighting, and an extractor fan. The door is sealed using a draught excluder strip - I'm going to see how that does, might need something more industrial to provide an airtight seal.

The access hatch is still a work in progress, and will also have an acrylic window in it.

The printer's running in there just now, seems to be getting nice and warm in there. No heating yet, other than the build plate.

Your pictures of your enclosures have given me some ideas about making mine.
Thanks for posting the pictures!

I've seen a few people running these "full" enclosures that completely cover the printer base an all. I wonder the ambient temperature that the rambo and psu are operating at and if it is safe for long term use?

I am building a full enclosure in an insulated cupboard that i bought from the IKEA junkyard.

I shall be changing the side panels on the printer to be able to attach a pipes that feed and remove air from the outside. So even if the printer is completely enclosed it will be as if the electronics bay is on the outside due to ventilation.

I have also ordered some copper heatsinks for the IC's on the RAMBO, they are fairly cheap so i will install them everywhere.

I am still pondering if I should provide peltier based cooling for the extruder motor. Or if only the fan will suffice.

Does anyone know what is the maximum temperature for the other components on the system? I suppose if i heated the whole enclosure to 90 degrees the printer would not like it. I vaguely remember reading on the reprap forum that after 50 deg C, they wanted ventilation of the chamber to cool it. They were cooling one of the steppers with TEC's (Thermo electric cooler, or peltier) and i guess because the enclosure is small the heat buildup was favorable for 1 motor being cooled but adding cooling to the other motor would prove to be too much heat. Or so they estimated.
[For every unit of heat TEC's suck up, they generate 2 units of heat. Therefore if you are sucking 10W from the motor, you are pumping 30W in to the enclosure].

Generic Default has posted about what you should and shouldn't have above 50C. He said the belts do funny belt things above that temp and you shouldn't try anything like that with the belts inside. He also talked about the Acetal bearing covers having some issues as well, they soften and develop flats if they are left to sit. Obviously the electronics and motors can get above certain temps either, but you seem to have that covered. Honestly, I think the way to go is to have an extruder that mounts in between the upper and lower plates on the top of the machine, and then encase from the top of the base to the bottom of the top (minus the extrusions and carriages) in Plexi. The real trick is figuring out how to get a seal that still allows the arms to move up, down, and around. Then you could get that baby to any temp you want provided your hotend is liquid cooled (eyyyy kraken eyyyy). If someone figures out a way to do that I will print them a medal for being a pretty cool dude, because thats a pretty cool accomplishment.

A linear mechanism with linear bearings would remove the belts and the roller covers. Then they could be enclosed. But them it would not really be a rostock max anymore.

It's all about how far you want to go to solve a problem

I have seen some square bellows. On the machine (a 3d touch scanner) an axis was coming out of a slit in the bellows. But that was a much sturdier setup. Implementing such a design to the rostock may cause delta arm blues type of problems.

http://radragchain.com/m/product-2-6-ro ... Portrait_0

Either use one wall of this to seal the carriage to the outside. Or cover the towers inside the chamber and introduce a mild airflow.

Some good ideas here - I've been thinking about the temperature issue, although it's not an urgent concern for me as my printer's in my loft (attic), and it's Scotland, in winter!

I'm lucky if it gets up above 35 degrees inside the cabinet, even over the course of a 12 hour print. One day I saw it said 40, and wondered if that would cause any trouble, but it's fine so far.

The sealed access hatch is installed, along with the workmanlike 4-inch domestic extractor. The duct from the extractor is looped back into the chamber - it leaves from the top rear corner, and returns to the bottom front corner via a grille. The lowest point of the duct forms a "u-bend" which I've filled with loose active carbon pellets. So it's really an air recycling system, but given the ambient temperature in my loft, and the thin wall of the duct, I think it also provides cooling.

It also seems to work passively. I think the rising warm air leaves the relatively well insulated cabinet through the fan naturally, and cools as soon as it enters the duct, falling down to the active carbon from where new air entering above pushes it back into the chamber. I say this, because I haven't actually been bothering to run the extractor, as the ABS smell seems to disappear during the print anyway. Before I installed the duct & carbon, the cabinet would stink after a long print.

Here are some photos of the chamber as it is just now, closed and open

That is looking really good.

Watch out for drafts with your air re-cycler.

Yes, I had that! I'm going to print a hood to direct the flow downwards to the floor of the chamber, and see if that helps.

For now, I'm finding that the recycling seems to act passively - as I said above, I've got a notion about how this might be working, although no idea if I'm right about that beyond the fact that the smell does seem to have gone away.

I've installed the same system in another chamber I've built, and switched both my printers to ABS now I don't have to smell it.