Transcript:
[MUSIC] So I have this thing, which is a 3d printer. It’s kind of cool. Actually, it wasn’t very expensive and the XY is taken care of by the bed moving and by this arm moving in and out and that takes care of the XY. And then this section moves up and down for the Z position, so it doesn’t print a huge amount, but it is really can acute and wasn’t that expensive, but one problem with this obviously is getting to stick to the bed and the cooling problems once it comes out. And what do you do about? That really is make a heated bed Now. You can buy heated beds of various qualities and at various prices, so the simple sort of bendable rubber ones, a kind of 10 or 15 pounds. And then the more durable flatter ones can go up to a couple hundred pounds, actually, if they include all the electronics, but the basic one itself is round about 40 or 50 pounds, so there’s this huge variety of pricing and that pricing variety comes from the added benefit that you have, because obviously what you’re looking for. When you’re looking at a 3d printer is a very flat bed, and if you have something that’s been double rubber. It relies on the original bed and sticking it to that and that that is actually nice and true and it isn’t often so the more expensive ones. Use something like this. This is a bit of aluminium. It’s three millimeters thick and it’s a lovely bit of aluminium plate and I’m not sure what grade of aluminium that is, so it’s gonna be a probably a little bit flexible. You can get thicker aluminium like a five millimeter thickness and different grades of it’s you get a relatively stiff and brittle aluminium that won’t. Bend very well, And if you have that top machined, you’ll have a beautiful, flat bed too. Attached to your Princeton and heat. So what we’re going to do is where you’re going to use this stock to make a bed for this printer, but what we’re gonna do with this is identical. If you make it on rubber, if you make it on thicker on a menu, maybe make it on a different aluminium grade. It’s still the same method that we’re going to be using to do this and to do this. We’re going to use a method that I explored in earlier videos where we take the bare metal and we coat it with the heat resistance, insulating paint and this is stove enamel. It’s good to up to 650 degrees centigrade, so if we apply a coat of stove enamel to that that will insulate the metal pledge from the electronics that I’m going to put on there and what we’re going to do is a resistive heater made from our conductive ink. Now this is a graphene, best conductive ink available on the shop, and it has some really awesome qualities, actually. I’ve been using it for all kinds of things, and I met an oven out of this in a previous video and that’s. What put me in mind of this Hoplite? We’re going to use those components to make a resistive heating bed. The quality of the bed is going to be fixed by the material that you choose to make it from. So if you use five element millimeter aluminum of a high-grade, that’s have this surface milled. You’re going to get a beautiful bed. If you are willing to spend 200 pounds on it, that is if you want to spend slightly less, you can get a nice grade of relatively flat aluminium, which is what this is a three millimeters thick, so resist spending and of unknown grade, but it’s a nice bit of metal and that was. I think that was eight pounds. Fifty actually for that, and if you really don’t care, you can get a bit of plastic pen, the bottom of the bottom of the plastic and stick it on there, rely on the bed, and that’s going to cost you about 50 pence or so, so there’s a huge range of variety of the material. You can make the bed from depending on what it is that you want to achieve. Now, we’re going to make it from this bit of element. We’re going to be putting it here and on here. We have four little bolts that fix this bed to the travel arms, and those are the bolts that we’re going to pop positions. Rather they were going to transfer onto the aluminium so that we can bolt the aluminium on here now. I did think about cutting that aluminium down to the same width of the bed, but that’s this a beautiful bit of aluminium, so I’m actually just going to fasten it on there and use that entire aluminium sheet. Obviously, if you’re making one, you would cut the other mininu’m to the size that you want it or order it cut to the size that you want it again. The procedure is going to be exactly the same. So now when we get our bit of aluminium and it should come the nice plastic bit on there and a bear bit on there and that has been handled. And you just saw me do it. There has been handled many many times so the first thing to give it a wash with acetone. Take a little bit of a rag clips and give it a wipe over quite rigorously with your acetone to clean all of the grease handling grease machine increase storage muck offered first surface the element of the aluminium there. I’ve obviously done that. The next thing to do is to take a very fine grade of wet and dry paper, and this is a p1 and 1200 grade and go over the surface with the fine grade that gives it a bit of tooth so that the tense can actually adhere to it quite well, and then after you’ve done that another clean with the acetone, when you’ve done that affords touching it because you have now got a beautifully clean, grease free surface. That’s got a bit of tooth to apply the pens to, and that whole thing like. I said is gonna go on there now. We need to transfer the Bach marks from here to here, and that’s going to depend on your bed. Just measure everything carefully and get those bulk marks transferred onto the surface. Now remember, it’s going to fit that way down and you’re working on it that way, so remember to mirror the transfer positions of your bolts because one thing that we need to do is cover those bolt positions with a little sticky dot. So this will prevent me putting paint on those ball positions because I don’t want the heater to come through on those bolt positions so that I’m quite happy to drill through them later when I want to fix it to the bed without having to worry that I’m shorting out by heater, So if I applied those bolts there now that surface is going to want to be painted, but I don’t necessarily want to paint to the edge. I don’t depend the whole surface, so I put a bit of masking tape on it to whatever position You actually want this to be painted till, and I can see. I’m going to have to just move those position markers for a second. I got these dachshunds deadly from a craft store. So I’ve got a ton of these dots that I can use there. We go so now what I’m going to do is spray it with three coats of this stuff. You need to spray it. Let it dry spray it, let it dry, and it needs to be really tough, so it’ll dry in about an hour, but you need to give it about 24 hours, so all you’re gonna do is spread this and then leave it for 24 hours. Now it is, actually. I love the smell. It smells of pears, but people say. Hey, do it outside to do in a ventilation. Wear a mask. All that sort of stuff, it’s a young paradise, really view and making a ton of these things. Sure you’re gonna make one or two. You’re probably going overkill doing an entire spray booze. Brook to you the your spread even coat onto the surface of your metal there. We go and we give that some time to dry. Hi, so this is the next day, so it’s had a nice time to dry and there. It is our beautifully coated aluminium sheet with this stove enamel now. I’ve got to attach a connection point to this, and because I’m gonna take this up to quite a high temperature. I mean, when I’m using it if I use it on a printer. The temperatures relatively low. You’re only talking about 200 degrees at most, But I want to test this in other applications as well. So I plan on taking this quite hard. I know they do that what I’ve got here to attach. It is a rather nice ceramic block. This will insulate against the heat transfer and against the contact with the metal. So that’s what I’m going to use to make my wire contacts and it’s gonna sit about that. We have a look at the 3d printer, but it doesn’t matter that that’s going to sit there. I’m gotta be facing down because it’ll sit here in the middle overhang, where the connector is will be underneath the pledge with plenty of overhang now. I did look at other 3d printers, and we have a very similar situation. If we have a small overhang with the downward projection, then it doesn’t get in the way of the mechanism, so you’d have to place this where it’s not going to get in the way of the mechanism of the forward, move backward or side-to-side movement that you’re going to have so having an overhang isn’t an issue as long as you think about where your printer is and where that overhang is going to go. No, no, let’s get there what I’ve got. Is this rather nice stuff? Which is five millimeter copper tape. So it’s a beautiful 5 millimeter copper tape, and I’m going to attach it onto there and then bring it to that contact point there and I can do that by putting a little fold in it. Bring it there another little fold and then into there now. It’s got a glue on this side, so I want to make that’s slightly longer so that can fold it over copper against copper, And then I can just put the copper into the block here, So that block is gonna go about halfway, and I’m gonna make sure its half way because I want it all to be nice and neat, and this is 300 so halfway fifteen hundred, it’s gonna be that. That block is 30 34 millimeters service 15 17 millimeters either side, so there and there, so that’s where my block is going to sit just that so this copper tape needs to go from here more or less. Bend and down there. So I’m going to do that and then show you when I’ve done it, okay. So then we got, there’s the copper strips on and the brought close together so that you can go straight into that ceramic block, a little bit fiddly to do that but worth the effort because it certainly solves any soldering issues that you might have now. This thin copper tape has a glue on it, and obviously that glue isn’t going to stand up to the heat, but we’re about to paint loads of pen layers on that, and that will act as a heat resistant to on the edges of the copper, so even though the little bit of glue that will be left won’t actually hold the rest of it is such a large surface area with the heat resistant. Glue that it’ll be just fine now. Here between these two strips is where we’re going to paint the inks to conductive ink because that’s our heating area. Obviously we want a nice, neat job, so mask off the area that you don’t want to paint and you can see that and just outside of the copper strips because I’m going to paint over the copper strips and that’s where we’re going to apply our heat ink now. This paint is a plastic surface. So we use that trick that. I’ve been pointing out a lot in the other videos. Put a little bit on and give it a wipe over so that you get the adhesion to the surface. If you don’t do that, then the and paint will bubble up. It won’t actually adhere firmly and as you can see, it’s quite a nice sort of graphene graphite color already and that will make the next layers firmly attached to that spent layer so that all we have to do when that’s had a chance to dry is paint a layer of the resistive ink and then the thick of the ink, then the less resistive it’s going to be. So if you’re using 24 volts, two coats will be fine. If you want to use 12 volts, three coats will be fine. The experiment with putting more coats on to see what kind of heat you can get for very low draws, then put more coats on me because we’re putting on an iminium surface, so it’s actually quite a stable surface and in paint terms, we can put a fairly thick coat on there and as you can see that rubbing with the primer coat that we just did make sure that we get a lovely paint coat on there. Which is what we want. We want a nice and even paint coat on there at all. We have to do, it’s like that dry so there. It is nice and right now we peel off the masking tape, Just the inner layer, not the outer layer, so peel off this stuff there. We go peel off the stuff that was masking the area that you wanted to paint the conductive paint on. Okay, because now what we’re gonna do is give that another coating of the stove enamel over the area that we’ve just painted, so I’m just masking off the tails of my copper, and now I’m going to spread this area making sure there’s no dust on it [Music] and we give that three coats, so here’s. The pen job finished. What we’re going to do now is just remove these strips and attach the connecting block and then we’re ready to go. So we’ve got a little bit of cleaning up to do. We’ve got to attach the block to here, which I’m just gonna drill through to attach and then to put those into there. So I’m going to do that. And when I’ve done that, I’ll get back to you, okay, so here. It is on test. It’s been running for eight minutes and here’s the plate here. I’m not gonna actually touch it because you can see on the reader. It’s now at 104 degrees centigrade. There’s the temperature sensor and it’s going through this meter because I was asked to display the temperature readings, and that thought that was really quite fair. Actually, so I’ve got to set this up so that you can actually see what the temperature is. It’s drawing 32 volts at a time so that makes it about 256 watts as a heater. I did try it. At 12 volts! Honey, it can’t have moved it from room temperature. A few degrees 24 volts works, but it’s quite slow. It took about 30 minutes to get up to temperature here. At 32 volts, then we’ve had nearly nine minutes and we’re getting quite high and we can put that up to 48 volts. So I guess one way of controlling the speed at which this heats is to pump the voltage through. You want to keep it less than 50 volts because those are the low voltage regulations. I quite like this 32 volts, but clearly you can arrange whatever you can arrange to to actually heat that, but really what the seen here is that this heating bed is working absolutely a treat when out 106 I’m going to turn it up to 48 volts. Okay, so we’ve got 5.4 so now that’s around about a 500 Yeah, 500 watt heater and you can see the temperature actually is shooting up here. When our 114 16 so ideally, this wants to be about 120 degrees, and there we go 101 degrees centigrade, so it hits 120 degrees centigrade quite easily on 48 volts. It will get there on 32 volts. It’ll take ages on 24 volts and at 12 volts, It’s not gonna work at all, just because he can’t get the temperature up, really. When you consider what this is, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s a big sheet of aluminium, that’s radiating heat out, and although it’s taking the energy, it can’t raise that temperature above its losses for its input and so it can’t really get that high, So I’m gonna leave this for a little while, and we’ll see how how that goes, so it’s been 20 minutes and that’s 178 degrees, so I think that’s actually plenty hot enough in that time, so I’m gonna call a halt there. I’ll probably test see how actually high you can go some of the time, but for that much, that’s really toasty for that to get to that temperatures. I think pretty impressive. So there you go start to finish how to build a 3d printer heating bed to vault onto one of these. Now, obviously there’s quite a lot of variety in those, so you’d have to measure the bed size that you want and where the fixings are and remember Mark how the fixing this is. Its deadly still on its 191° Now it’s really toasty. I can just feel the heat wafting up from there Now. I use three millimeter aluminium, but there are a fair few options and this is quite a nice one. I think this is a magnesium printing plate becomes really quite flat because you’re gonna print from it. Obviously it’s about seven millimeters thick and it’s already coated on this side of them insulating coating, so you would just apply it straight on so this would be quite a nice material, but you want something. That’s relatively hard and inflexible with a level surface on the reverse of it. If it isn’t a curtain insulating coating, then what we did was coat it with an insulating coating. Then paint on your heater and then pick your voltage supply That allows you to heat that to a reasonable amount of time now. 30 by 30 is quite a large pledge and its three millimeters thick, so it represents a substantial thermal mass. So I got took awhile to get up there for turning on, and it’ll take a while to get back down again. I actually want to say a while. I think it was like, 10 minutes. Something like that? It took 20 minutes to get up to 118 and these are the basic things to remember. Otherwise, it’s really quite an easy job to use this stuff, our conductive ink to do something like a 3d printer heating pad anyway. I hope that was of interest to you and thank you very much for watching.