TAZ 5 Cabinet Temperatures

Just ran a 30min print and noted the temperature increase of the cabinet. So the starting ambient temperature was 16 degrees, and after 28 mins of printing the internal cabinet temperature was 28 degrees. I think my original cardboard box version was getting to about 40 degrees internal. I'm going to leave the heated bed on for another 30 mins and see what it gets to. Of course cardboard is a better insulator than acrylic!

So to increase the internal temperature, I laid piece of cardboard on top of the top acrylic sheet. The printer has been running for a few hours, but had settled at 31 degrees. With the cardboard in place it's now just above 38.

TAZ5 cabinet completed

Here is the finished cabinet.
Width: 650mm
Depth: 650mm
Height: 580mm

I have changed the spool holder idea, now the top rack is for storage only. I added another extrusion arm inside the cabinet, this uses the existing guide nice to another support strut, and means the printer can be used easily without the case.

Plenty of room on top of the cabinet for storage and laptop etc. The acrylic does bend a bit, so I may look into more internal support.

I'm going to leave the active cooling for now, and just see how warm the cabinet gets during printing. I have the parts ready to install, but this does make the build more complicated, and may not be necessary.

TAZ 5 fitting the acrylic sheets

Although the sheets come cut to size, the corners need notching out so as o clear the cube connectors holding the extrusion together. I roughly marked each corner and cut them out on a band saw fitted with a metal cutting blade.

TAZ5 cabinet finished spool rack

Here is the completed cable rack. The idea is that the front four reels will all go down through the top cover through a single hole.. Or I may just make the front one feed through.

TAZ 5 cabinet material spool rack

This is my idea for the spool rack.

Using these 20mm clamps

 I'll put a piece of 20mm aluminium tube about 200mm long centres in the clamp. Then a reel goes either side of the clamp. I'll have three clamps so can store six reels. The front four reels will all align with the spool entry hole in the top of the cabinet, allowing easy switching between four material colours.

I've printed clamps to stop the reels faking off. You can buy these in aluminium or steel but they are expensive!

TAZ5 cabinet thermostat

Printed a bracket to hold this LCD thermometer. The thermometer has an external probe on about 1m of cable that I'll place near the rear middle of the cabinet.

TAZ 5 Cabinet temperature control

I have a basic plan to add some kind of cabinet temperature control using a 120mm PC fan and a thermostat PCB I picked up on eBay.

I'm going to try the cabinet without the fan first, and upgrade if required.

Also 3D printed an exhaust port for the fan, so the toxic exhaust air could be ported out a window!

TAZ 5 Cabinet

I've installed three strips of LEDs around the inside edge of where the doors will go. Also another difference with my design is that I went for twin split doors rather than one big door, which looked kind of awkward to open due to the size!

Lulzbot TAZ 5 cabinet

Having had a great experience with my TAZ5 so far, I recently tried some large parts in ABS, and ran into trouble with splitting and warping. So I decided to try adding a cabinet to keep the part temperature up. To do this I used the box the TAZ came in, which made a huge difference, but was not very scientific, so decided to build one.

I had seen the design on the Lulzbot site, which I quite liked, but decided to go a slightly different route. The main differences would be a slightly smaller cabinet with material reels on the outside for easier swapping. And an air intake port for the electronics. Although the electronics are supposed to be happy up to 70 degrees, I'd rather pull in cool air to them. If this cools the cabinet too much then I may port the air out of the electronics box also.