UP! Plus / Afina Heated Build Chamber

cults3d

This is a Work In Progress. It was a built in kind of a rush, so I'll be uploading more details when I can. The temps in the office fell to below 50F after the heater broke. The builds were de-laminating and generally poor quality. The heated build chamber tends to maintain at about 50C and all my prints since then have been great! This is the best quality I've ever gotten and not a hint of warping. I'm worried about cooling for the motor and extruder and will be hooking up an air pump to the extruder shortly. I used a small heater I picked up from the thrift store to heat the chamber. It's called the "Worlds Smallest Big Heater" from the Sharper Image and it works great. I Imagine the extruder and the platform would heat up the chamber if you didn't have a heater, but I liked having the option. So far it has worked wonderfully well. I have the heater on an outlet timer to turn it off after a while, if prints are left un-attended or I forget. It has a high and low setting. I've been using High and get about 50C build chamber temps. I've left the base of the printer out of the chamber because that's where all it's brains are. There is a slot on the top of the chamber where the filament feeder tube runs. The spool mount is bolted on to a piece of ply above the rear of the printer. It would have worked better to use the usual mount, but I moved the location of the printer which made the usual mounting location un-usable. The front and right sides are doors. After using this for a while I am very glad I made them as big as I did. I'm also glad I left extra clearance space all around, especially vertically. This is very helpful when working on the extruder. If you were building one, I'd put a third door on the other side as well, but I ran out of plastic in the scrap pile. The doors are acrylic and I think the sides are either acrylic or polycarb (thin sheet). I made a custom build platform which is wider than the stock UP! build platform to accommodate the bulldog clips which could be struck by by the extruder during large prints before the modification. The actual build tray is GRP which has been scratched up with a knife. I'd like to use the CNC to make a better looking tray but this seems to work well enough for now. I've never had a print raft lift from the platform after I started spreading a thin mixture of ABS dissolved in acetone over the build tray every 10 prints or so, or after I clean the tray. I've uploaded my Wall Thickness Tester stl because I was required to upload something not an image. The thicknesses start at 0.1mm and go up by 0.1mm incrementally.