Sneeze Guard Idea

General LulzBot TAZ
1

Work is buying me a Taz 5 which rocketh mightily after two years of budget printer use. Now I’ll have the best there is, some say, and I want to build a good enclosure for it.

Well I see the plexi box approach, the wooden box approach, even the styrofoam box approach… and it seems like something a bit lighter might do the job. You see, the heated bed makes the printbed area plenty warm I imagine as it did on my first printer (ROBO3D), and we all know that heat rises so why do we need a full box enclosure?

I’m thinking of a salad bar or buffet food bar where they have the cover that you can see thru yet serves an important function. I mix that in my mind with the notion that heat is escaping upward and needs to be contained somewhat but maybe not completely…

So how about a clear cover that is like a salad bar, angled down front and back and angled or even rounded on the sides, keeping the rising heat inside of it. Then we have three zones: bottom zone is hot, top zone is hot, middle zone gets heat from below and from above, so middle zone is hot.

I bet if I build a salad bar covering the top 1/3 of my Taz 5, I could measure a thermal profile that was even enough for most tasks, yet does not put my Taz 5 in a box, so to speak.

Comments?

Les
Make history!

2

Often, print quality can be affected by drafts, particularly ABS. Depending on the environment, an open structure may not be sufficient enough to get good repeatable results.

Scott

3

I’m going to be looking at building mine this week hopefully. I’ll probably make it out of polycarbonate. Forget laser cutting and all that, it will cost a bomb, jigsaw and a drill and some sealant along the joins.

I’m actually going to make two, a little one for the filament to sit in joined together with a fan and some car turbo pipes I’ve got knocking about. I think it’s the only way I’ll manage to print fair sized Nylon prints at my workplace.

Drafts are the worst things ever for ABS, specially at work where doors get left open and you get kept busy so the printer can be running a long time without being checked up on. I’ve had some horrible messes to clean up.