Heated Enclosure

[pyronaught]

Guys the Filastruder does a great job on consistency, it just sucks for extrusion speed. I get 1.71mm all day long... ovality is 0.02.

I wonder if speed and consistency are tradeoffs. The Filibot Wee has a much higher extrusion rate than the Filastruder, it would be interesting to know how consistency is with that one.

[insta]

They absolutely are tradeoffs. I can do about 1kg per day when it's running well, and I have to have a winder to get that consistency. I use the filament I produce for commissioned jobs though, so it's not too terrible

[pyronaught]

How much time do you have to put into it? Do you just load up a big hopper with pellets at the beginning of the day and then it's hands-off the rest of the time or is it one of those things you have to keep checking on?

[insta]

Officially you don't leave the machines running unattended... but where have we heard that before...

The stock hopper holds less than an hour's worth of pellets. People have made replacement hoppers on Thingiverse that allow you to screw a 2L bottle into them, and a 2L bottle holds over 1kg of plastic. I top it off, let it run into the winder, and top it off when I get home from work (well, when I'm running it...).

The winder is the problematic part for a variety of reasons. The primary thing is the spool is held in place by tension provided from a nut, and the direction the spool turns will undo the nut that holds tension...which causes the spool to freewheel. When this happens the winder can't take up slack and very quickly the extruder starts piling filament in an unsalvageable tangle. The other problem is when the extruder is running quickly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgVLU803A7s), the filament can drop out of the range of the sensor. When that happens the winder will cease turning (since it thinks it pulled too much and is waiting for the filament to fall back into the eye) and it will make an unsalvageable pile again.

The extruder can happily run on the edge of a table and spool onto a giant pile on the floor. Tolerances this way are still 0.06mm or so and you can let it run for days before winding it up.

[pyronaught]

Here's some feedback on the heated enclosure so far. Basically you never need to run the hair dryer because the machine heats the cabinet up enough as it is. In fact, if you want to run with the door closed you actually need to use the cooling fan to keep it in a range that won't overheat the steppers. However, the hair dryer set to blow cold air is actually very useful for cooling off the build platform in a hurry. In the picture below, you can see a 3" PVC elbow redirecting the hair dryer air to point at the build platform. I'm going to just add a separate manual switch for the hair dryer and use it primarily for this purpose, since being able to pop the part off the glass without waiting around 15 minutes is nice.

As for ABS warping, I still get gear teeth curling up due to shrinkage when not using a raft even if the chamber is at 110 F and the build plate is at 100C. Using a raft fixes that problem though. The cabinet is really great for noise reduction though, especially if you have to work sitting right next to it all day.

platform_cooler.jpg (328.85 KiB) Viewed 7246 times