As mentioned previously, I’m enclosing our Solidoodle 3 printer to try to get better results through minimizing warping and parts not sticking.

As a slight aside, the Cubestick on glass is now working very well for sticking.  The trick is to wash the glass plate with low-residue soap, dry it, and apply a fairly thin but full coat of the Cubestick glue.  By itself, the Cubestick has not been perfect but mixing that with the enclosure described below seems to have eliminated pulling up, and I will soon be testing a few tall prints to see if delamination warping is improved.

The Enclosure

I admit that I did not design the enclosure.  We are using paeltz’s design that was posted on soliforum March 4th.  I printed out all the parts, bought the materials, and began assemblying.  I did not really modify anything but added an 80mm exhaust fan with carbon filters that I will soon add to thingiverse.  Even without attaching all of the weatherstripping yet, I am already getting stable printing temperatures in the enclosure of 32C.

 The Fan

Once I decided to use an enclosure, I changed my mind from having an exhaust that would use the spool holder (and needs a large hole drilled into the rear metal wall of the printer) to using a spot on the plexiglass.  Since paeltz’s deisgn included a riser section (to allow room for the filament coming into the extruder assembly), I figured I could incorporate it there.  Then, I simply decided to replace one of the plexiglass pieces in paeltz’s design so I would not need to have a lot of cuts and shaping in the plexiglass.  Lastly, I chose to locate the filter inside the printer so it would not get in the way of the spool or electronics and would even be able to passively filter the area when the fan is not powered.  I had a lot of 1/4″x1/4″ cylindrical neodymium magnets so I decided to use those to hold all the parts together but make them easily removable.  Again, the details will be in a forthcoming thingiverse submission.

The Webcam Monopod

Up until now, I had used a simple adapter and mount for locating our Logitech webcams onto the frame for the Solidoodle 2 and 3.  The enclosure would get in the way so I figured I  would try another way to mount the webcam and test whether their is a drop in photo quality when the webcam is directly attached to the vibrating printer or from below.  I simply made a bunch of 3″ sections that had male and female ends to allow adjustable height.  Also, I made the bottom piece snugly attach to the cart holding the printer, and I adjusted the top piece to allow connection of different webcams.  In the end, I don’t know if what I have is improved over having something simply suction cup-mounted to the front section.  If it grows on me and/or I receive lots of requests, I’ll post it to thingiverse.