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My wife got tired of my printer being in the dining room, so we bought a cabinet to put it in and get things cleaned up. It fits great, but... now I'm concerned about heat. Should I be? I typically print PLA.

I plan to move the filament spool out of the cabinet, I just need to drill a hole in the top, and print a spool holder.

My bigger concern is the electronics - should I vent the cabinet? Should I separate the electronics from the build platform, and vent the electronics, and let the build area stay warm? Does it just not matter?

I've got ideas on how I can make either way work, just need to know what's recommended. Thanks!

Here's a not very good picture of it in the cabinet. Haven't moved the spool yet.

Mine is in an ikea cabinet. I have not had any problems. In fact, i do not get layer separation with the larger prints.

No problems with the electronics etc....

Some extruder motors do get hot, if that is your case, then you may want to add a fan to the extruder motor. Mine also gets hot, but i do not have a fan there and do not seem to be having problems.

The printer is happy up to 50 degs C.


PS: I only print ABS, never printed PLA.

Just don't put anything in the cabinet. I remember a horror story of a 3D printer fire that was caused by insulating foam that was glued to the inside of a cabinet that melted off and fell onto the hotend.

Jimustanguitar wrote:Just don't put anything in the cabinet. I remember a horror story of a 3D printer fire that was caused by insulating foam that was glued to the inside of a cabinet that melted off and fell onto the hotend.

Interesting. I was thinking of making an enclosure from 1" foam board (Home Depot), 18" x 18" x 48", for my future Max v2, that will be in my garage (50-90 degrees). Thinking a small heater with thermostat (or just a 100w light bulb?) could keep the small area at a semi constant "room temperature". Probably 3 sides and top foam, with clear acrylic front door. Is this a bad idea? Probably this stuff:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/R-Matte-Rmax ... /100317820

I moved the spool of PLA up above the cabinet, but still had a major jam due to the extruder getting too hot. Going to have to figure out a solution for putting a fan on it for sure. Other than that, I think the cabinet is going to work very well... up until the jam, the print looked excellent.

tcat007 wrote:

Jimustanguitar wrote:Just don't put anything in the cabinet. I remember a horror story of a 3D printer fire that was caused by insulating foam that was glued to the inside of a cabinet that melted off and fell onto the hotend.

Interesting. I was thinking of making an enclosure from 1" foam board (Home Depot), 18" x 18" x 48", for my future Max v2, that will be in my garage (50-90 degrees). Thinking a small heater with thermostat (or just a 100w light bulb?) could keep the small area at a semi constant "room temperature". Probably 3 sides and top foam, with clear acrylic front door. Is this a bad idea? Probably this stuff:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/R-Matte-Rmax ... /100317820

The HomeDepot Foam board should work fine.
The 100 watt light should work, if not enough heat then you could go with one of the radiant heating bulbs.
You will need a way to monitor the temperature inside the enclosure and if you put an exhaust fan inside it would be possible to control the
temperature electronically.

I have a peltier device cooling the electronics bay and heating the cabin.

I think it is a good solution to a problem that did not exist.

I did a couple things, seeing if they worked now. First, I zip tied a heatsink to the side of the extruder motor, which is helping to keep the main body of it cool. (I checked, and it is moving heat away, the motor is cooler, and I can feel the heat distributing into the fins of the heatsink.

Second, I cut a hole between the vertical center divider in my cabinet. In the storage side I put a 4" desk fan, with a funnel directing its airflow into a tube that I've run & zip tied so it's pointing at the spot where the filament is extruded, so it's cooling the toothed gear that feeds it. The funnel isn't a perfect fit, so I'm printing a better one I designed now, and finding out how my overall solution works at the same time. I'll probably also print something for the other end of the tube, to more precisely direct the cooling where I want it to go.

It's been printing for about half an hour now, though, and so far, so good.

Eh, I'm not sure what I can do here. I had the bolt on the extruder at a nice cool temp, and 3/4 of the way through the print it failed anyway. No signs of problem on the PLA, but it started doing that knocking sound, and it starved for filament. Put the fan directly on the extruder as soon as I heard it make that sound, got the entire extruder cooled pretty low, and made no difference.

This is the #1 problem I've had with it... got through a lot of prints in the last week, thought I was past it. Back to the drawing board, I guess. Hopefully this doesn't mean I can't keep the rostock in this cabinet with PLA, it's really a good spot for it.

Adjusted my retract settings, lowered the extruder current slightly, seeing if I can get past this, again. Started another print this morning to see how it does.

You may wish to raise hotend temperatures, and clean the hobbed gear. Consider also adding a cap screw into the extruder spring to increase grip. Maybe also add thermal paste between the extruder motor and the heatsink, to improve thermal transfer.

I've tried higher temps, currently running at what it says is 211, but my measurements tell me is 201. If I go much higher, I get a lot of stringing.

I keep the hobbed gear clean, I have a wire brush I use on it periodically.

Have a cap screw under the spring, and thermal paste on the heatsink. Got 1 hour 20 minutes into my current print before I heard kickback and see it's starved out some again. The motor is warm to the touch, but not hot. It doesn't appear the hobbed gear is eating into my filament near as much now that I dropped the temp and have cooling on it.

I am using the prometheus hotend, and I think it's just backpressure building up in the hotend... so I think I'm going to have to troubleshoot the prometheus. My "transition zone" on the prometheus is currently 2.3mm, I'm going to try lowering that some, which should reduce the backpressure slightly (not much there to tinker with, though) going by this page: http://www.dta-labs.com/pages/user-guide

Changes made today:

Reduced the transition zone from 2.5mm to 2.0mm on the prometheus.

Reduced the motor current value in the eeprom by 5.

Slowed down retracts from 40mm/s to 30mm/s.

Shortened the retracts from 2.5mm to 2.0mm

Made it through the print that has been failing without a single kickback, so that's the good news. Got a lot of strings around the print now, which I didn't get before. I can clean those up, though. Might play with the retracts a little to see if I can reduce those, but I'd rather have some cleanup to do than a failed print.

After making the above changes, I made it through 3 prints with no kickback. I do have a lot of stringing now I didn't before, but it's really wispy and easy to cleanup, doesn't seem to leave marks on my prints, so I may just end up living with it.

I did add some vents to the back of the cabinet, to let some of the heat escape. That should help some.

This one looks real pro: http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6802

Definitely fancier than mine!

My prints have stopped failing - the biggest change was shortening the transition zone in the prometheus hotend. I'm actually getting a lot of stringing now, so I'm lowering the temp a bit to see if I can eliminate that. Always something to tweak, isn't there?

Set your prime/retract to somewhere between 15 and 25 mm/sec. One of our forum gurus figured this out. I used to think, "oh, we should retract fast as hell to combat blobbing and stringing." Fast as hell is stringy as hell! I might get one or two spiderweb-thin strings on my prints every now and then, and it's all because I lowered the prime/retract.