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 Doors

Cutting the doors from a single sheet of 4mm acrylic in my pacer CNC router

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!

TAZ 5 Cabinet acrylic

Acrylic has arrived! Time to chop the corners out and for it.

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.

Laser cooling

The J48-1 I have can be air cooled, so this seems like the simplest option! The manual states that an airflow of 250cfm is required on both sides of the laser from two fans. This is quite a large air flow to achieve with two 120mm fans, do I have opted for four fans giving a total of about 450cfm. I'm also using a fan controller to regulate the fan speed from based on a temperature range of 35 to 55 degrees.

The fan controller with two of the 120mm fans.

Inside the fan control box.