I have been working on an enclosure for the printer and thought I would share some of my progress thus far. My goal is to dampen the noise from the printer as well as providing a more controlled environment for it to print in. This mod has been designed to be implemented together with a front door, I have built this door by TomasKrueger: thingiverse.com/thing:624325 .
Below you can see a quick rendering of the concept and also a link to the full album with my current progress.
It might not be too pretty, but the only other option in my mind is to build an enclosure which covers the whole printer. An option which at least I felt would be far too bulky and expensive. I also liked to have the critical electronics outside the enclosure to keep them cool. The enclosure is very much a work in progress and I will possibly build a small enclosure for the Z-axis carriage from the scraps of acrylic plastic sheets I have left. I also plan to implement some kind of exhaust system for this enclosure before I start experimenting with ABS.
It is getting there, still some corners left to be printed though. I may have overdone it with the sheer amount of screws and nuts needed to assemble it, but at least it is sturdy!
As for how easy it is, I will have to wait and see when I have all the parts needed for the top. The acrylic glass sheets sits quite snuggly in the lower brackets, but are not attached to the brackets with fasteners, therefore I do not think it will be too difficult to remove the top part for maintenance of the printer.
It is proving to be quite sturdy and fairly easy to remove from the lower brackets, providing easy access for maintenance when or if it is needed.
Removing the top is not something I would to when the printer is running though, since it requires a bit of force to lift it.
It also requires a bit of force to fully seat it in the lower brackets.
I might go back later and fill in the slight gaps between the corners and acrylic glass with a hot glue gun or with some tape.
Next up I will try to make some kind of enclosure for the z-axis since that is where most of the noise and heat escapes most now.
The project has required quite a lot of filament, below you can see what is left of my 1kg filament roll:
This roll has been used almost exclusively for this project, but that includes some prototyping parts as well as some botched parts due to warping and so forth.
I would estimate that there is nearly 48h of printing time for this project. The 4 top corner brackets alone were 4h per piece at 0,2mm layer height.
I might post the parts with their current design to thingiverse as a WIP when I get some time to gather them.
Man thanks for making this available for us im printing it right now in red abs at .1mm layer height with 50% infill so far i have 3 of the 8 corners printed. It takes about 5 hours to print each corner. But its coming out pretty awsome
