I just thought I’d let you all know about the heated bed I made for my printer. It cost me about £30 so far, and I think it will end up costing somewhere in the region of £35 to £45 once I have made all the improvements.
My modification involves removing the existing bed in its entirety and replacing it with a light-weight sheet of 2.5mm thick high-grade aluminium, with a 230V 300W silicone heater attached to the bottom. This is controlled using a solid state relay, which at £5-10 is far cheaper than a power supply & MOSFET, as well as being much more efficient and powerful (no hot, expensive bulky power supply).
At the moment I am using my sheet of glass with buildtak on top of this, but soon I will get a sheet of Polyetherimide to adhere directly to the aluminium sheet. This will make the bed lighter, thinner, quicker to heat up (if it wasn’t quick enough already) and quicker to cool down. I will post photos of it when it’s complete, and if there is enough interest I can assemble some kits for people to use with the aluminium pre-cut and the wiring all sorted, as well as the build surface.
Sounds awesome but I personally dont want any mains Into my buildarea. I think with all the moving and grinding parts you need to be very carefully with placing your wiring. It might look good for the first week but after 100th of hours printing you just can’t be sure about the state of those… I just want to put my hand inside it and know for sure I can’t get shocked or anything like that. But that’s my opinion. I’m sure if you’d engineered it all really well that wouldn’t be an issue… So good luck with it, and make sure to post some detailed pics cuz I’m interested in how your going to approach this.
Hi Daniel - this sounds great. How do you supply the silicone heater with mains voltage - do you take it from the inputs to the power supply of the printer? I sure it can be made safe if done carefully - I’d love to see some pictures as I’m starting to print a lot of boxes, and the bigger they are… well, I’m sure you can guess the rest!
And I’m just a tad lazy to do a full heated bed installation.
Hi Daniel - this sounds great. How do you supply the silicone heater with mains voltage - do you take it from the inputs to the power supply of the printer? I sure it can be made safe if done carefully - I’d love to see some pictures as I’m starting to print a lot of boxes, and the bigger they are… well, I’m sure you can guess the rest!
And I’m just a tad lazy to do a full heated bed installation. ;-)[/quote]
I attached the live from the bed to the live on the PSU, the neutral to one side of the relay, and then the other side of the relay to the neutral on the PSU.
At the moment I have the relay sitting on the table underneath the printer so it’s out of the way and safe, but I will attach it with bolts to the bottom of the bed when I have some more time. I’ll post pictures soon!
