Want to get your 3D prints to the next level? Check out our Heat Set Inserts and Tools at cnckitchen.store (Free shipping worldwide starting at €100). QUESTION: Should all enclosed 3D printer use an active heater or is this something for industrial printers?
Just my personal opinion: it ultimately depends on the materials that one commonly prints with. Active chamber heaters are commonly PTC and can be an electrical hazard if not implemented properly as seen in this video, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-81M_4skLzUM.html&pp=ygUKcHRjIGhlYXRlcg%3D%3D. However, printer manufacturers who target the prosumer market should delve more into this aspect. It's not entirely illogical to assume that the buyers of such printers are interested in making usable parts for their business. This is the way forward. It is what Stratasys, Markforged, 3DXTech, Essentium, etc. are doing - albeit at much, much higher chamber temps and point of entry.
Stefan, Ich besitze den x-plus3 und möchte nur darauf hinweisen dass man definitiv vorab das aktuellste Firmwareupdate auf den Drucker laden sollte, bevor man mit ihm richtig druckt! Die Updates bringen in meinem Fall fast immer signifikante Bugfixes, Performanceverbesserungen, und sogar neue Funktionen! Hast du das Video denn überhaupt mit der aktuellsten Firmware des Druckers gedreht? Gerade dass die Chamber-temp. nicht den Sollwert erreicht kommt mir etwas verdächtig vor…🤔 Toller Content in jedem Fall, ich bin ein mega Fan deines Channels 😍 English. I own the x-plus 3 and realized the importance of their Firmware-Updates for their ner Devices, as they will always at the very least improve the printer‘s performance (like the bug that was shown where the enclosure didn‘t properly heat to the set temperature) and in most cases bring some added functionality for the on-screen menu, and at the very least make the printer more reliable! So I am now wondering if you did start the Video about the Printer with the latest firmware installed, as many reviewers have complained publicly on youtube about problems like bad printing quality and bad performance due to some bugs and missing features, just because they didn‘t even bother to install the latest firmware and were hence reviewing a device, literal months after Qidi released an update with all their issues fixed🤦🏽♂️
Fortunately "HAD". One of the big patents that they had were the movable curtains to separate the chamber from the printhead and motors, which is very important if you want to go even higher higher in temperature.
I made an actively heated chamber for my ender 3 as part of my diploma. in short: - ABS at 65°C (chamber) - cca 60% better layer adhesion - PETG at 50°C (chamber) - cca 25% better layer adhesion - PLA at 40°C (chamber) - cca 10% worse layer adhesion Also huge improvment in dimensional accuracy for the printed parts... (i also got the inspiration for te layer atision test from your chanel so thank you! ;) )
@@p_serdiuk Well if you use 3D printers for printing toys and crap with no functionality whatsoever then yeah you are screwing around...I turned a cheap "toy" into a reliable tool. I certainly don't need validation of my degree from you.
@@zanmarinic I use printers to make drone parts and outdoor stuff so it's a valid tool, it's just hard to turn a hobby into a profession and very few people manage to achieve that
@@CNCKitchen Since the thesis is in Slovenian I doubt you could get any use out of it :) To answer for PLA and PETG... for layer adhesion test I printed hooks (similar to the ones at 10:42) and since the prints were relatively small I could go to 40°C for PLA and 50°C for PETG. But when printing bigger parts/longer prints you need to lower PETG chamber temperature to 40°C otherwise you get a clogged nozzle..at least I did. For PLA I cant tell, since I don't use it much/didn't test it on larger prints...
I've been waiting for you to make this video for years. According to a friend who has a printer with an active chamber that goes up to 100 degrees Celsius, ABS needs 70+ degrees, optimal is 80 degrees. At that point the print orientation doesn't matter. 70 is the minimum accordning to him, I imagine if you had a printer with 80 degrees you would get even more increase in layer adhesion.
I made an active camber myself... above 65°C you start to get issues with heat creep... for 70°C+ you need a watercooled hotend, otherwise you jam your nozle with biger prints..
I run my machine at 70C and use a watercooled extruder stepper. Despite this I am bottlenecked by extrusion speed. The external dryer also runs at 70C. In the summer the watercooling radiator is not powerful enough and extrusion starts to fail if I let room temp reach around 30C. So I use AC to keep room at 25C. In the future, keeping the filament at 25C prior to reaching the extruder gear might allow faster print speeds on my machine.
@@redboom9874 It depends how good the heatbreak and fans are. Fans differ a lot in performance. With a heated chamber cooling requirements increase dramatically. The goal is to cool it slightly below glass transition temperature and let it stay at that temp for the entire print. Glass transition for pure ABS is like105 Celsius. I think the filaments have additives that make them more printable and that's why they have lower glass temp at 90 C.
In my personal experience, ABS layer adhesion is mostly affected by the nozzle temp, although going above 75° chamber also helps. I personally never print ABS or ASA below 70°, as thats the lowest that I consider reasonable, and up to 85° if I need strength. PC blends and PC/ABS also become super easy above 75°, while "real" PC loves temps above 90°. If you build your printer accordingly, printing complex parts out of PC isn't all that hard. Fwiw, PC printed at high (ambient) temps while being perfectly dry gets you as close to isotropy as FDM can realistically manage
That chamber heater blowing directly on the bed cable bundle doesn't seem like a great idea... Also, you can add one of those heaters and a controller to any printer for ~$30. You didn't mention how long it takes to heat up the bed, I think that is 24V? So it's probably going to take around 10 minutes or more to heat up to 80C or so I'd guess. I don't know why they wouldn't use an AC bed for the price they're asking.
Stefan, great video and I was waiting for this since a looong time from you! Now there is finally someone in the community who is addressing this issue. It's like MirageC and the importance of drying your materials, which is a must in injection molding. Why not in FDM / FFF was really suspicious to me > materials are the same. About your findings I can give you one hint: the Tg (glass transition temperature) playes a hughe role here. My rule of thumb is to know the Tg of the material you want to process and use at least this temperature (sometimes +10°C, depending of the heat distribution in the chamber) as the chamber temperature. This is how you process polymeres right. As an example and this is why Stratasys was going with a heated chamber: 1989 there was now material for the AM (FDM / FFF) technology, only injection molding grade material. So, to print real ABS you had to have a chamber with elevated temperatures to deal with the shrinkage. Really interesting stuff if you think in the approach of physics and why it is not possible to print PEI (Ultem) on an open machine > Tg of around 217°C. The temperature difference is too high. Keep on going and never stop producing great stuff! Greetings Andreas
Hi Stefan, I´m the winner of the 2019 Solvay AM cup. I built a printer that has a 230° heated chamber, if you want i can print you some other high performance material samples that are printed in a high chamber temperature. For the competition we used PPSU
I wonder if there are any differences in how you cool the parts after taking them from a heated chamber? Is there any benefit in slowly ramping down the temperature in the chamber in comparison to taking them out and "shocking" them with "cold" ambient temperatures? What happens if you throw them in ice directly after printing?
I'd guess that cooling them down not too rapidly might make sure that internal stresses are as low as possible, but I think there isn't a big difference, when printing at 65°C. If you go all the way up to 100°C this might look different, though.
In extreme cases you can watch it warp and crack in real time if you cool it too fast. That is if you take it out hot off the "oven" and put it at room temperature. Not sure what happens if you throw it into a bucket of ice water though, but I'd imagine it only gets worse.
depends on thickness. while standard 2 wall parts doesnt suffer, thick 1cm wallers willl bow bend immideately. so when i do huge chinks i let them cool down in chamber for up to 4 hours to room temp, it release internal stress.
As you mentioned, the heated build chamber will give the layers more time to melt into each other. This also explains why slower printing resulted in stronger parts in some of your previous tests. Another issue to take into account is shrinkage. PLA shrinks about 0.3 - 0.5%, ABS 0.7 - 1.6% and ABS/PC Blend 0.3 - 0.6% (depending on the type of blend). Nylon (PA) is even worse. Depending on the type this has up to 2% shrinkage making it very prone to warping. Adding glass or carbon fiber as a filler material reduce shrinkage so those are easier to print. I think there is uneven shrinkage during cooling and most shrinkage might occur as soon as the temperature drops well below the glass transition temperature. This could also be a reason why materials like ABS (Tg = 105C) and PC (Tg = 145C) almost require a heated chamber whereas PA (Tg 45 - 70C). It would be nice to compare especially ABS and ASA in this respect. Both have around the same Tg (ABS 105C, ASA 100C) but ASA has a lower shrinkage (0.4 - 0.7%)
How about a part heater as an opposite for the part cooling fan? With that, bridging could be actively cooled, and the rest actively heated for better layer adhesion.
Question, i believe while you were printing you had the part cooling fan on, assuming that you were printing the same file for each test with just the enclosure and heater being different, wouldn't the fan be cooling down the print more when the ambient air temp is lower? If thats the case, the increase in strength from having the chamber heater might be reproducible by just turning down/turning off the cooling while printing.
Good point. I had it on 10% all of the time and for all prints and of cause that increases cooling at lower temperatures. Might check that at some point.
It's interesting that you were only able to get 65 C chamber temps with active heating. With a passively heated enclosure, that's typically pretty easily achievable. If you want to get above that, the "blanket mod" (i.e. put a blanket over your printer to keep in the heat) does wonders. Rather than active heating, I would prefer that manufacturers implement better insulation so that less energy is used during printing. Bed heaters put out PLENTY of heat to get a chamber up to ABS printing temps.
@@horuswasright I think he meant that he wonders why it could not reach 65°C with passive heating. Not why it only reached 65°C with active heating and not more :D
hmm after seeing this im not shure anymore to get a X1 carbon or this printer i think the AMS is kinda need and highspeed is very handy so you dont need to wait for parts but heatet chamber seems to be VERY Good thing to have
I am pretty disappointed in the lack of testing done on this topic compared to some of your older videos... You didn't do the impact test or show a variety of other filaments. Especially because you showed various strength testing of PLA, PETG and ABS all together before but you didn't even bother to recreate that with updated data.
It’s more a show of concept. He got sponsored so there is conflict of interest, and QIDI is a pretty inexperienced company. Not to bash on them or anything, it’s good to have innovation.
I recently got the acetyl/POM filament printing consistently in my bambu. It is probably the strongest material I have every used by a long shot, and I am more and more convinced that it is the next popular engineering 3d printing material. I could not break a 8cm z height 8mm diameter tube by hand while all the other ones broke easily (I train powerlifting). POM seems to have a perfect layer strength, reaching a true isotropic behavior, since the fracture plane is always 45 deg. However it does suffer from a whopping 120ppm thermal contraction, so the width of the part is limited to around 3cm for x1c @ 50c chamber temperature. If not for the warping, POM would actually be quite a pleasant material to print, with no stringing, sticking, oozing, good dimensional accuracy, and post processing machinability. I wish there would be more printers with actively heated chamber and possibly with higher temperature limit at around 100c.
I've been having extreme hard time printing this filament. It's very finicky. Like the difference in +/-5 degree can fail a print. U a boss for conquering this task!!
something about passive heating: With just the addition of a few fans below the bed of a Voron 2.4 350 (kit from LDO), If I print with a bed at 110 like shown, my machine end up reaching an equilibrium at around 64 celsius. but that takes quite a bit of time to reach
I think the real news here is the Stratasys patent expiring. If that's really out of the way, expect a lot of these on the market soon, probably with higher temperatures and less safety testing.
Did you get them yet? I just got a Qidi and it does take a bit of set up initially (more than Bambu) but its dialed in now and prints ABS like PLA...every printer should get a chamber heater! Hopefully we start to see it more.
@@HeroAges-x9u Not yet, just due to the demand of the kinds of prints I'm selling right now the X1C ended up being the safer choice for a 2nd. As all my settings/calibration profiles for my P1s transfer directly over with no fuss. However the third printer which will likely be somewhere around Dec is going to be a tossup between Qidi, Peaopoly or possibly the Prusa XL depending on what revisions/updates to the platforms look like at that time. I really like the concept of the Prusa's multi heads, but it's current cost for the sheer amount of problems it has places it firmly on the watch but no buy list. I want it to succeed as I would love a less wasteful approach to multi color printing as I mostly do multi color printing.
Want to print ABS on an open printer - print it at 300 degrees and 60 mm/s. 95% of delaminations will go away. Even big parts becomes printable. Heated chamber is required only for PA6, PSU, PEEK and other very hot fillaments. ABS is usualy prints fine on an open printer. Just crank up extruder temp.
Great video, and something I looking into right now for my structural parts. Are you able to expand on this and also look into print speed and part cooling against enclosed and or heated?
Just a headsup for Voron owners: You can get quite high on chamber temp using methods that, essentially, blow air at the bottom of the heated bed, causing it to run at a higher average power and thus put more heat into the chamber. I use a combination of the Nevermore V6 (activated carbon filter) and two "BedFans" (both mods can be found with a quick Google search) on my 350mm V2.4 and I have seen chamber temps as high as 72C after a good heat soak and a few prints. ABS prints like an absolute dream in this situation. I haven't done any "real" layer adhesion testing, but I know it's damn good, much better than without the filter/BedFans. Of course these mods can probably be done to any enclosed printer as long as the bed heater can manage the extra load. The biggest disadvantage is that it does take longer to heat than a true active chamber heater, and also the fans used will fail prematurely due to their close proximity to a 100C bed.
Would you consider a bake off between 3DXTech Ez PCCF and Prusa PCCF, and include a test for heat creep of the printed parts (not nozzle heat creep)? Several folks on Discord are complaining about heat creep on Voron parts printed in Prusa's PCCF in warmer chambers (but still below 100C).
Definitely not a new concept. Heated chambers were quite popular in 2013, when I started 3d printing. Probably because the ABC was the mainstream back when
I just added a chamber heater to my VZ Bot (the exact same heater module that it seems qidi are using apparently). It has improved my ABS performance considerably. Once the bed got to the lower half of the machine the interior temperature up near the extruder started dropping and the upper halves of tall prints would start delaminating.
As far as the X-Max 3 goes, you will want to contact Qidi support and ask them for the upgraded induction bed leveling system. The BLTouch sensor will fail eventually, for me it failed after about 250 hours of printing. It seems that all of their new stock of the X-Max 3s are shipping with the upgraded leveling system from the factory now, now that they realized the BLTouch was definitely not the way to go for a printer with an actively heated chamber.
Thanks for this video! I have an X-Max3 at home, which I bought because I wanted to print in higher end materials like PC and Nylon. At work I run a fully enclosed industrial printer with water cooled heat break and motors, and a chamber temp up to 135C! The heated chamber definitely makes a difference. I never get parts detaching from the bed or layers delaminating. I'm still working on figuring out how to prevent the filament from curling up on steep overhangs, though.
The first printer I ever used was the Stratasys 1200SST and it would print the Stratasys ABS in a chamber that was heated to around 170C. Those parts came out super hot, but I still have some of them from about 20 years ago and I never saw any of them delaminate. I don’t know when we will see chamber temps that high on consumer level printers though. Edit - The chamber temp was 170F not 170C.
170°C chambers seems unlikely that we will see in hobby printers. Also how did you avoid heat creep? From what I've heard. Note heard, not experienced, you start getting heat creep in ABS if you go much above 90°C chamber temp. Now if that 170° was Fahrenheit it would translate as 76°C, almost 77 degrees, close to the 80 degrees some people have been talking about as the "perfect" temperature for ABS. Some claim that for ABS a chamber temperature somewhere around 80 to 90 degrees makes the layer adhesion good enough it doesn't matter the direction you test the strength. Layer direction or at a right angle, the strength is the same. Again this is something others claim, I'm just trying to make head or tails of this.
@@blahorgaslisk7763 Ahh, you are correct I was thinking C but that was the Fahrenheit number. It was a LONG time ago for sure. I still have that machine, although it isn’t functional any longer. But I checked and the chamber temperature on it was 170F not C (so it was running around 75C). That is probably doable for consumer level. The nozzle would print around 300C. Their “ABS” was a special blend of ABS also, I remember them saying that it was not pure ABS.
@@blahorgaslisk7763the key is to separate the printing chamber from the rest of your components and space. One example would be the use of bellows: only the nozzle sticks into the "hot chamber", while the mechanics and cold end are much colder. You don't run into heat creep problems, plus you can heat the chamber far beyond the limit of normal EPDM belts, which is at 120° long-term, 135° short term
I built a heated chamber for a printer years back and the goal was 70c and I learned A LOT from that. 1) Don't use a bed slinger! Core XY is a must. It helps keep the plastic and electronics out of the heated chamber. You don't want the plastic to be soft before it hits the extruder gears. 2) Don't use acrylic for something going that warm, at least not thin acrylic. It will soften and sag. 3) If you're using a metal frame, definitely consider water cooling your motors. Especially at around 60-70°c your motors don't like running that hot constantly. A metal extruder will cause issues as well.
I'm also happy with my QidiTech X-Plus 3 printer. I did notice that the wire from the heating element lit up on the thermal cam at 11:08 , isn't that going to cause some issues?
I used a cheap food dehydrator as the active heater for my TEVO monster enclosed by cardboard panels. Although the camber temperature maxed out at 50C I was getting ABS prints at the same quality as PLA, and ABS was my standard filament in that machine. It also helped to have the part cooling fan set to 10-15% during printing.
Very tempting printer especially being integrated with Prusa slicer (ex-slic3r). This is pretty much my experience with ABS on my original Ender 3 - I built an enclosure using that 1" pink foam stuff that builders use for insulating houses, and inlaid aluminized bubble wrap. Cut a window in it for a flap of perspex and it works really well - temperature gets up to around 65 °C too just using the bed at 105 °C. Also uses less electricity because less energy is needed to keep up the bed temp. It takes up a lot of space though, but is a cheap solution. Plus, the enclosure is also a useful box to store freezables while defrosting the fridge freezer!
Did you move the LCD enclosure or any other of the electronics of your Ender out of the heated chamber? Stock belts and steppers operate ok at these higher temps?
@@alangustaveson1461 Enclosure open at bottom, but sealed to prevent air convecting up and out. Display untouched, but just below bottom of enclosure so not so warm. Moved PSU to bench. Made 3d printed guide for ambient air to reach electronics. Steppers/belts fine at higher temps.
Qidi makes some good printer glad to see a good and well thought out review. They we kind of in a rut for a while with the mk10 hot end but they really knocked it out with the x max3 Im just waiting on the early teething problems to be worked out which seems to be the case.
As someone else mentioned the Stratsys patent, it also indicated that the motors/electronics are kept outside of the heated area. It's easy to hate on Stratsys, but I think we should probably dig more into their patents (ignoring the abuse of them, that's the point of patents... exclusive usage of something for a period of time before it becomes public domain) and maybe go "wait... don't _just_ heat the chamber, more motors and electronics outside of it too". They probably have something on how to bring a print down to room temp (which was another comment) and some number of other topics that could be interesting for better prints. I'm just guessing... I only know the "put electronics and motors outside of heated chamber" thing, not if they have something on cooling or part strength.
I've been wondering since seeing this vid. Would printing a transparant plastic with the activly heated chamber, allow a better fusing of the layers, and thus a more clear 3d printed object???
Just a thought, but wouldn't some kind of fdm nozzle + laser engraver head hybrid be possible? Like laser melting the previous layer a bit to improve layer bonding?
I would have also included a test sample done on the prusa, a true open frame 3d printer. An open door on the qidi is not the same as a fully exposed bed. Other then that, great work and waiting for a proper non-biased review of the Qidi
great video! what is your opinion about leaving the parts to fully anneal after printing with heated chamber? After the print leave the printer closed until chamber temp reached close to ambient.
Just curious and thought it would be an interesting idea to see if someone tossed a thermometer and a little heater in a bamboo and see if you could get similar results....
Ich hatte vor Jahren an der Uni mal Zugriff auf einen professionellen FDM Drucker, die haben fast ausschließlich ABS verdruckt und hatten dafür die Bauraumheizung auf 90°C gestellt, alles vom Hersteller des Druckers als Profil hinterlegt. Schön zu sehen, das die Patente endlich ausgelaufen sind und wir in den Genuß besserer Möglichkeiten kommen. Schade das Bambu Lab mit dem X1E aktuell den Vogel abgeschossen hat.
Das X1E fügt einige Funktionen hinzu, die das Max3 bereits hat, ist aber so teuer, dass ich es nicht als Konkurrenten für das Max3 sehe. Das X1E ist eher auf Unternehmen ausgerichtet, während das Max3 aufgrund seines Preises eher für Verbraucher geeignet ist.
Fun fact with the Xmax3: If you put a towel over the top to keep the bed heat contained inside the unit it will stay about 52c or 125f while printing ABS. That is without using the chamber heater at all!
With regards to strength. Why are we heating the whole chamber, instead of just the plastic we are about to bond to. I could imagine lots of solutions like hot air, lasers, or an ironing nozzle. But wouldn't printing really really slowly do the trick as well?
I was doing exactly that a build volume of at least 300x300x300 is what I wanted from bamboo and was ready to order the second it was announced to replace my ender 3 s1 plus, but they released the A1 much to my disappointment but I get it and actually I think it was a great thing to do so i pre ordered it and ordered a Qidi X-max 3 hopefully it lives upto the hype 😬.
I’ve been using heated chambers for some time now, one thing you may have missed is, with a high chamber temp, you can use part cooling on ABS, ASA, PC and Nylons without compromising layer adhesion or suffer any warping.
I have a very modified Prusa mini (all plastic pieces had to be reprinted in PC to avoid deformation) working at 75°C since 2 years, I only print in ABS and the results are very good, it is good to see I am not the only one seeing this. PC can also be printed on this but warping is still a problem for big pieces .
Neat printer will add it to the list of possible bro for my old Any S. Stefan about other thing : could you please explore the self-realigning property of PLA prints when submerged into hot coffee ....i mean water :-) Don't judge me, it was closest thing on hand and it was broken anyway. :-D
You're comparing apples to oranges because the weld point is so much hotter with the hotter chamber. I'd like to see tests normalized for sum of chamber and nozzle temp being a constant, or even just something like (ABS) nozzle at 300°C and chamber low or unheated.
I am afraid 65°C is too low for actively heated chamber to see proper differences. On profi machines like Finnish MiniFactory Ultra 2 with up to 250°C for ultra polymers printing it's the game changer.
I would be interested in seeing PLA/PLA+ tested in a heated chamber. You can get the chamber to around the annealing temp of the PLA, and I'm curious how the strength would be affected if it were printed at that temp instead of annealing afterwards. Also as a side note, Makerbot, who's machines are some of the worst printers I've ever used, used heated chambers instead of heated beds on some of their printers.
I greatly appreciate the channel. As a beginning maker, it would be great if you could do an in-depth video on how to calibrate a printer to a filament - everything from printing blocks to dial in extrusion, to temp towers, to retraction, top speeds and the dozen most common / useful slicer settings. I've looked around RU-vid for this, and there doesn't seem to be anything really good and in-depth about this topic there. With your systematic, analytic, pedagogical approach this should be a video many would enjoy.
I have the Flashforge Adventurer 3 Lite which is already enclosed and I was able to make it actively heated by cutting a hole in it and sticking in a $20 200w desktop heater. It gets it to at least 55c and I haven't had any issues but my ABS prints have been turning out good. I have the extruder fan turned on.
I think I may actually get this 3D printer instead of a BambuLabs P1S for my first FDM printer. It runs the open source Klipper firmware, meaning that I'm unlikely to get screwed over by Bambu deciding to remove firmware features or lock down their walled garden more in the future. It looks like it's a works-out-of-the-box experience which will be great for me since I just don't have the mana to spend re-tuning and readjusting a printer. And the hot end is apparently thread-compatible with volcano and V6 nozzles, although not bore depth compatible--there's already a third-party mod on the market to enable V6 nozzle compatibility, so I feel like this printer is more modifiable should I desire to modify it in the future. Or maybe by that point I'll have grown into being brave enough to build a Voron! 😋
Hey Stefan, have you considered nonplanar 3d printing to increase layer adhesion? It seems to me that you could increase the surface area of each layer by making them wavy, or a jagged saw tooth.
Have you thought about printing some temperature-sensitive PLA coupons to place in various spots within an enclosed, but not actively heated, printer to judge readyness for printing? those PLA start showing a change at about 40 °C so it's quite perfect for the purpose. Even if PLA softens at 50 °C, they won't droop/melt even at 65 °C if they have a support along the whole surface of the base.
Ok, take classic Ender, remove all electronics. Build Ikea enclosement box with doors. Buy cheap PID controller, borrow GF's/wife's hairdryer. From dryer and PID controller you can made closet heater for printer with temperature control. Put printer in and electronics outside (use extra cables if needed). Put fire alarm near if you think its needed...
As a Prusa Mk4 user, rather than screaming that you're making Mk4 look bad, I'd rather make Mk4 look good by building a DIY enclosure. Not sure if I'll make it passively or actively heated, but it's been my plan from the start. I'm not a big fan of the official enclosure though... looks weird, is very expensive, and doesn't even look that well insulated.
I designed my heated chamber with halogen light bulb. It is cheap and simple. I just had to pull a light cord. It lights up well and heats the entire chamber well. 100w bulb do the job well for printing ABS in my ANET a8 plus... I suppose a 50W should do the trick to PLA. I use a laser thermometer to measure the motherboard and it is ok.
That hotend is familiar, looks like either a licensed version or a copy of the GARCAD hotend. God rest his soul, if he wasn't such a character, we'd have all got his invention sooner and he'd have been much better off... Maybe even still alive, but I quite enjoyed his 'character' lmao.
I think 65degC is too low for optimal ABS prints. The printing temperature should adjusted towards the glass transition temperature of the filament. If you print ABS at glass transition temperature the part would be very soft and sag easily, so that must be taken into consideration. The cheap printers never exceed 60degC chamber temperature as this is safe for most stepper motors and electronics. If you want to go higher in temperature you would need a chamber free from electronics, like a baking oven. This would be more complicated and expensive to achieve.
The question what i’m having here; what would be the break-even point where certain materials don’t print well anymore. When the temperature is so high that it cannot cool down enough, you’ll like get smushy prints. In this case I’m talking about the technical materials, but i’m expecting it will end up similar like PLA where is talked about.
Well, I think active heating is not really way to go. Rather is a proper thermal insulation of the chamber. I recentry insulated my enclosure, it is important to use fire resistant or at least non flammable material and my enclosure temperature go from 48C to over 60C. Need new thermometer for accurate readings. Hovever i think heater is waiste of 300W. I plan to insulate also the front door, and leave small window, and also use the same air to dry filaments. Anyway with proper insulation bed heater is enough to get to 65C and you can set the temperature by only actuating vents for pasive air circulation. You would only need a fan for PLA prints.
i'm not sure why you gave them a pass on heating a large bed and chamber . either there's enough heaters to heat the device or there's not. Just because it's big it doesn't mean it shouldn't heat evenly and hold heat indefinitely
Thank you for a great video, again! I just completed building an enclosure for my printer and it can get up to 48c passively. I was wondering what kind of heating should i add to be able to reach 60c?
I don't understand why the majority of the manufacturers of 3D printers are holding back on using actively heated chambers. It's 7-8 years ago that the patents expired, so what are they waiting for? Is it for the majority of the consumers to realise, that there is a huge advantage in this setup? I hope that Stefans work will push them into more focus on that subject.
I recently purchased a Neptune 4 Pro. It prints ABS great at 110 C bed temperature, 255 C first layer nozzle and 230 C nozzle for subsequent layers, and a clear 30 gallon trash bag draped over the printer as an improvised enclosure. The 110 C bed passively heats the trash bag chamber to 50 C. It's a trash solution that is very inexpensive and works very well on a fast Klipper based $289 3D printer.
I love your videos, they are entertaining and to the point. One request regarding sound. I assume you are slightly processing the sound of the videos afterwards. Could you turn the frequencies of sharp "s" sounds down a little please? As a headphone user they are biting into my ears a little and I really want to hear what you are saying :)
All Machines probably would have come enclosed and heated but the patents for the ability to sell enclosed and now heated enclosures just became available. The market has been locked up for 40 years. Now we can Play , work, and earn.
Stephan, not sure if you will read this as this video is now 10 months old but to make the z axis interlayer bond strength even stronger how about increasing layer height and nozzle diameter so there is more mass put down with each layer and then increase the print speed ao theres less time for the previous layer to cool down. The time until the nozzle returns to the same location is key so then smaller parts in the xy axes should perform even better.
Delaminating layers on ABS means, that your printing parameters are totally wrong. Hell of a lot of people print ABS on bedslingers using easy ways like plastic bag or cardbox and have fine results.
