Transcript:
Today we build a 3d printer enclosure building. A 3d printer enclosure is definitely nothing new. Even the builds out of these. Ikea lack tables. They’ve been done many times. But recently, Prusa Research released a version that they came up with their version of this build, introduces a lot of cool features, including spool holders, hinges for the doors and magnetic latches. They even came up with parts. That will help you integrate your mark. Two or more three into the design. Definitely go check out proofs this video on this enclosure. You can get to it up here. All the information on that build and the parts that I used will be in the description below. Now, let’s check out all the parts we need and get this thing built. Here’s all the printed parts you’ll need. Prease has done a pretty nice job at batching these all up into their own. STL files. So there’s just a couple of groups that you have to print out, and conveniently they all fit on the proofs of bed, so you’ll have the set of bottom corners. You’ll have ten cable clips. These will be on their own plate. The door handle and cats are on their own plate. You’ll have a spool holder plate. That’s all this stuff. I’m actually going to print out three of these because I’m going to put three complete spool holders on the top of the enclosure. You have the plate that holds the PSU. When you put it underneath the enclosure, you have a plate with the top corners and the hinges on it, and you’ll also need some sort of reinforcement for your printer because we will be taking the PSU off. So whether you’re gonna put an MK 2 or an MK 3 you’ll need one of those parts. I’m gonna put the MK 2 on there, so I’ll use this one. And you’ll also need to print a piece that redirects the heat bed wires. I printed this one out of PE TG because it might have the chance of getting hot. It just redirects the wires up about 45 degrees, so they don’t clip the back of the enclosure and just a side tip since all these pieces are an. STL files bunched together. If you needed to just print one of these parts out and slic3r, you can just come up here and hit split that will split them all out into individual files. And you can remove the ones that you don’t want to print easy enough. Here’s all the non printed parts. I’ll be using. I’m gonna put a thermometer inside. I know what temperature the enclosure is. You’ll need some screws for the legs. I’m using number 12 by 2-inch screws and screws for everything. Else will be number 10 by 3/4 The boem calls for number 12 screws or 6 millimeter screws. But I found those are too big. Tin should work just fine. A smoke detector inside the enclosure is always handy to have. I’m gonna put this LED strip inside. This is 12 Volt LED strip and I’m just going to use a separate power adapter rather than trying to mess with hooking it up to my PSU, and then you’re gonna need some plexiglass. You’re gonna need five sheets in total, so you’ll have three four forty by four forty millimeter sheets, three millimeters thick, and then you’ll have another four forty sheet That’s split down the center for the doors, so it’s four forty by two twenty three millimeters thick and probably the hardest part to source. Are these four magnets? You need for the door latches. These are twenty millimeter by six millimeter by two millimeter link in the description and last, but not least you’ll need at least two. Ikea lack tables. These are very inexpensive tables that you can order from Ikea right off the internet, or you can go to your local store. If you want to build your enclosure even taller, you can just add another table underneath. So before we start the build, just a quick tip on. Plexiglas Plexi can be kind of hard to work with and it’s kind of expensive, But if you’re in the US, I found this company called tap plastics. They will cut the sheets down to whatever size you want, and then they’ll ship them to you. And even with the shipping, it’s pretty reasonably priced. So if you don’t want to mess with your own sheets and cutting them down. Go ahead and check them out now. We can start to build the top of the enclosure, So we’ll start by unpacking our first table. We’ll call this the front and this the back. The only difference is, this side will have hinges. So now we’ve got our four top corner pieces, and our two hinges The thinner one of the hinge is the one that goes at the top, so we’ll use some of our two inch screws and the holes that are already pre-drilled for the legs by Ikea to attach these corners. These front two are going to be the hinge pieces and the back two no hinges. So we’ll go ahead and screw those down now that we know where the front and the back is. We need to plan out where the spool holders are going to go. They actually have a plastic grommet that runs through the table. So we have to plan out where to drill those holes, so from the front of the table, we’ll mark out 250 millimeters and from the left of the table, We’ll do a hundred and forty-five millimeters. This will be where the first grommet goes and from that hole. It’ll be a hundred and thirty. That’ll be where the next one goes and then from that hole, it’ll be another hundred and thirty now the grommets for the filament or around nine millimeters, But I’m gonna use a 3/8 drill bit and they should work Just fine so now. I’ll go ahead and drill. Those three holes holes are drilled now. The grommets will go from the top of the table inward. We’ll put a little superglue on the grommets. Then we can slide the grommets in from the top, and now the grommets are in. It does give the table a nice touch so now that we know the path that the filament is going to take, we can avoid that path when we’re mounting our lights on our smoke detector, so let’s go ahead and put some lights on the front. I’ve got the adhesive back. Leds, I bought a lot of extra, but I want a lot of light in my enclosure. So I’m just gonna stick quite a few of these on here. I’ll just let the cord hang down in the back, and then I can run it to my DC. Adapter later now. I’ve got four sections of the LED strip stuck onto the top of the enclosure. Now I can just link them together with a couple little pieces of wire. Now all my LED strips have been soldered up, lets. Plug it in and give it a test. That is one bright enclosure. Now we can add our smoke detector, lets. Select a good spot for that. I think we’ll just put it here in the back. These tables are really thin. You’ll probably have to use the anchors that came with your smoke detector. Put the battery in test it. Ouch, our anchors are on now. We could mount the plate plates on nice and snug. Now we can slide our detector back on and now we’re safe now. We can attach the legs to the top of the table. They’re just going to set in your holder right like that, and you’re going to use your three quarter-inch screws and now all four legs are on now. The four legs are on, its time to take the plastic off our plastic sheet, and now your plastics should slide right into the grooves in the top printed parts, so they should slide in just like this. Then you can set the half pieces into the door hinges. Then these printer parts will fit on the bottom of the legs of the top part of the enclosure to help. Hold the plexi in place. This is where you’ll use the taller hinge piece, so we’ll slide these on the plexi. Don’t forget to slide your hinges in while you’re building. And then our last corner piece will be the piece that allows the wires to run through the bottom of the enclosure. It has a little valley in it well. Stick it over here now. Just the 3d printed parts on the plexi to make sure everything’s nice and square and then. I’ll attach these printed parts with some 2-inch screws. Now it’s starting to look a little bit more like an enclosure. We’re almost done with the top table. All we have to do now is put the spool holders on the other side of this table, so there’ll be three spool holders on the top of this one, and they just mount right here with one screw. You can use your 3/4 inch screw on these. They’ll fit just like that now. I’ll do the other two now. Your spool holders are all on somewhat evenly. Now you can take the spool bearing pieces that they give you, and you can put them together like so. And then when you’re ready to mount your spools, they’ll de set right like that. Now we can build the door latch pieces these to attach to the plexiglass and this one will screw down to the other table, but we need to glue the magnets in to both of these pieces, so two on that one and one on each of these. Make sure you have your magnets. Turn the right direction before you glue them down. You want the magnets to stick to each other now? The magnets have been glued in. We can just slide these two on the plexiglass doors. And there’s your door handle now. The top table of the enclosure is done. We can set this one aside for now and we’ll start working on the bottom table. We’ll open up our next lack table. Now we have the top of the second table and these four printed pieces. These fit into the cups of the feet. On the first table. These two, with the rounded corners line up with the hinges, so they’ll go to the front two corners all the way in the corners. And then you have one that has the wire. Valley, the Wire Valley goes out the back, so it’ll go in this corner over here and then one that’s just square. It’ll go to the right top corner. Now we can screw all those down with some 3/4 inch screws now before the top table mounts are screwed on now, we can flip this over and we can attach the legs with the hardware that Ikea gave us so the legs mount with this double-sided screw, and then you just use the leg as the tool to install it. So you just stick it to the leg Stick in the hole. Start twisting now. That all for the legs are attached. We can set this aside for a moment because now we need to prep the printer to go in this enclosure. The power supplies on these printers don’t like heat very much and they do require a little bit of ventilation, so proof set has designed some brackets that allow you to take your power supply and mount it underneath the enclosure. There’s also some brackets that take the place of the power supply on the printer to maintain the frame’s rigidity. I am going to unplug the 12-volt cables from the board that go to the power supply to install it. You might not have to do that when putting your printer inside your enclosure so first. I’ll remove these two screws. Then I’ll remove these two screws there on the foot. That’s on the power cover behind the printer. Then we can just swing the power wires underneath the printer. Then you can put your stabilizer piece on. You can use the same hardware down here from behind the printer, and then for these two holes up here, you’re going to need a couple of nuts. I recommend grabbing some m4 nylon, lock nuts, and then the screws can go in from the front, just like they did before now, our brackets installed in the back. And I’ve got the two screws back on the front now. Our power supply is loose. We can go back to working on the bottom table. So the best spot to put your power supply is on the backside of the table on the inside of the leg, so your wires will run over the top into that printed piece that has the valley in it, so it’ll attach something like this, so we’ll take our printed part and it’s going to fit on the bottom of the power supply, and then the whole thing will set on the leg, right like that, so there’s a screw here on the bottom and then a screw on the back of the printer part where we can attach this, so we’ll mark where this part fits. I’ll go ahead and mount the printed part from the backside with a three-quarter inch. Screw, make sure the power supply still fits looks good and then. I’ll put in my bottom screw. I’m going to use one of my two inch screws for the bottom one. Now that piece is on and the power supplier still slides in nice and snug. You’ll want to run your cables to the inside of the leg, right like that, and then you can install the other printed part. The tab goes on the foot. That’s on the control box, so it’ll go on just like that and we’ll use a 3/4 inch screw. Now, your power supplies on nice and snug, but it’s still easy to remove. And it’ll stay a lot cooler this way again. Your wires are just going to be sandwiched in between the power supply on the leg, and then they can come up and run through this valley. That’s in the printed part to keep them safe. We also need to modify our heat bed plug. Cover a little bit. I printed out this 45-degree angle piece from a mk2 that should direct the wires up and clear the enclosure so well. Remove this screw. That’s on the bottom of the heat bed. The holds the cover on will remove the zip ties and we’ll replace it with the new cover again. This is PE TG. Just in case it gets a little warm. The new plug covers on well. Add our zip tie back in there. That should be enough to angle the wires up and keep them out of the way now. We need to mount our door Latch that goes on top of the second table. It’s just easiest to put your top and closure piece on and then use the doors to line it up. Once you have, the doors lined up where you want them. You can then just open one door at a time and screw it down with your 3/4 inch screws. And now your doors should be functional now. I’m going to go ahead and build a third one of these tables because I’m going to stack the other two tables on top of it to make the enclosure a little taller and easier to work with, and our enclosure is pretty much done now. All we have to do is find a spot to put the enclosure. Get everything plugged in. Maybe run a test calibration, load some filament and then we’re ready to start printing [Music] [Music] [Music]. So now it’s all set up and it’s looking pretty good. There were a few other things that I did to the enclosure that I didn’t show in the video. I redid the power wires that run from the PSU to the printer added about four inches to each. So I just ran some new wire and then on the bottom table. I put some L brackets on it to connect it to the middle table just for some added stability. I also changed up the spool holder A little bit, so you can use narrower spools links to think of verse in the description below. Now, why would you want to build an enclosure well one. I think it makes the 3d printer. Look more finished like it’s an actual piece of furniture, but the main reason is so that you can print high temp plastics easier. This is an ABS test print without the enclosure. You can see it shrunk and cracked the model. This is an ABS print in the enclosure. The enclosure did reach about 30 °c during the print. But you don’t get the cracks and the finish is a lot smoother. Thanks again to Prusa for putting this design out there. It’s a lot of fun to build, and it’s pretty inexpensive. I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please consider giving our thumbs up or subscribing to my channel, if not leave your thoughts in the comments below and as always thanks for watching.