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New enclosure the culprit?
(discuss.tchncs.de)
Last week, I printed this lamp cover successfully. Print direction was "bottom to top" without any support material. Now, the last print of the same cover failed miserably. The main difference is that my Prusa MINI+ now lives within an enclosure so I assume the temperature within the enclosure might be the culprit here. Would love to hear your thoughts on it and I'm sure that you have an idea how to circumvent this situation in my next print.
I used PLA with a nozzle temperature of 200°C and a bed temperature of 60°C.
Looking forward to hear your thoughts ☺️
I recall a video from one of the 3d printing youtubers that showed that an enclosure could allow plastic printer parts to warp, causing prints to fail. It was really a surprising result to me, since I was considering buying an enclosure for my tevo tornado (which is mostly metal, but not entirely especially after some printer upgrades I printed)
A handy chart: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/a4/2f/18a42ffa5c733c7c6bb86b547fb0647f.png
It's a cruel irony that we use an enclosure to help print materials with a higher Tg but the printer itself is printed of materials with the same or lower Tg. It makes perfect sense that your ABS parts are going to get mushy when you crank your heated bed to 100 and put the whole thing in a box. :)
The enclosure by itself isn't really a complete solution, especially if it's a retrofit and not original to the printer. Temperature monitoring and control is necessary.
But you can also take the very simple step of leaving the enclosure slightly open (if it has a door, prop it partially, or if it's one of the growbox style zipper enclosures with mylar on the inside just leave the zipper partway open near the top). You'll still get most of the draft protection benefit and some of the temperature stability inside the enclosure, but it won't overheat.
Wow, that sounds alarming. I mean, one usually has good intentions when trying to protect the printer from dust and kids, but now I'm learning that it could potentially be more harmful than beneficial. Do you have the link to the YouTube video you mentioned?
https://youtu.be/2D-WRCGcJbs
This video does a good job of showing and talking about some potential issues with using an enclosure.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/2D-WRCGcJbs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.