My enclosure for Taz 6

We recently got a Taz6 at work and it has been great so far but they changed the temp. in the room where it is located to make it colder and all of our prints were having issues curling on the edges so my boss decided he wanted a box for the printer made out of the hard foam board we have called gatorboard and I decided if I was going to make one I would do it right. Like I said the box it made out of gatorboard, the windows are scrap pieces of visqueen we had and a spare piece of plexiglas that was left over from some project 10 years ago. I made the hinges and the handles on the printer its self and the hardware was scavenged from our old parts room. I measured the foot print for the box and then just improvised as I was making it. I have a door on the front for accessing the print and one on the side for removing/exchanging spools I also have a old computer fan on the side that I wired into a usb cable so it can plug into the wall with an adapter or the computer to vent the enclosure and I used some old magnets from home to make the doors stay closed. The enclosure took 2 1/2 days with printing and everyone seems to love it, also so far it seems to have corrected the issue with the warping by keeping the air at about 85 to 87 F not to mention it is light weight enough to pick up and move.






Looks nice! One really important thing you are going to want to do before you use that again is to make a cold air intake duct to route cold air into the control box directly. Otherwise you are going to fry your Taz, in partcularily the power supply and possibly the rambo board. Dryer vent duct or something similar will work, it doesn’t need to be a 100% airtight seal, but you need a provision that the fan in the upper rear of the control box can draw in room temperature air directly otherwise you will melt important things. Another option would be to build wire extensions and mount the box on the outside of the enclosure. Either way you will want to make that change before you run the printer inside that enclosure again.

I agree with Piercet regarding the need to channel cold air to the intake of the motherboard. Don’t get me wrong, the design and build looks really nice. I based my enclosure off of the amazing work johnathan did in his Hotbox DIY Enclosure. You can see the printed intake part on the second image here from my enclosure. I later enlarged the opening in the case so i could access the motherboard without removing the box and modified Jonathan’s design for the air intake here on thingiverse.

I would add that, as it relates to printing ABS, if you’re bringing in air from the outside with the fan, you may actually be reducing the effectiveness of the enclosure to some degree by effectively creating air turbulence inside. To what degree is likely debatable however, i’ve had great success over the past year with my box and I don’t use the fans at all when printing ABS. PLA is mostly a different story in my case. I print primarily in ABS (although PLA is picking up) but PLA isn’t nearly as prone to the warping and separation that i’ve seen with ABS. The enclosure is the only way I was able to print parts this size in ABS…


Cheers

Great tips. Thanks a lot.

It pulls air in on the bottom front and exhaust it out the top back on the Taz 6 control box. :nerd:

Well made.