Wednesday, May 12, 2010
A Heated Bed for Mendel
A little while ago, Nophead made a Dibond heated bed. Dibond is a sandwich of LDPE between two aluminium sheets, and is very flat.
I thought I'd have a go too. Instead of the TO220 resistors he used, I used nichrome wire taped down with Kapton on the back.
Then I insulated that with crack-filler foam, cut down to about 10mm thick with a bread knife.
It seems to work well. Here are the larger Mendel parts printed on it in PLA with it set to 50oC. Their bottoms are f. as pancakes.
I used a piece of ordinary aluminium sheet clipped on the top with bulldog clips to give me a removable tray with good thermal conductivity. That is what has the blue tape on here. The tray is flexible, but the Dibond holds it flat.
I thought it'd be clever to use the 5v supply out of my PC PSU, as that's not being used for anything else. But the current (16A) is a bit silly - connectors and so on get warmish. For the next one I'll run it at 12v and about 7A.
Dibond is rated up to 80oC, which means it's fine for PLA, but might not get hot enough for ABS.
I've integrated it into the host software, the G Codes, and the firmware and updated the copies in the repository. I have to go to Cardiff tomorrow to give a RepRap talk to the British Computer Society, but I hope to put all the details on the wiki over the weekend.
I thought I'd have a go too. Instead of the TO220 resistors he used, I used nichrome wire taped down with Kapton on the back.
Then I insulated that with crack-filler foam, cut down to about 10mm thick with a bread knife.
It seems to work well. Here are the larger Mendel parts printed on it in PLA with it set to 50oC. Their bottoms are f. as pancakes.
I used a piece of ordinary aluminium sheet clipped on the top with bulldog clips to give me a removable tray with good thermal conductivity. That is what has the blue tape on here. The tray is flexible, but the Dibond holds it flat.
I thought it'd be clever to use the 5v supply out of my PC PSU, as that's not being used for anything else. But the current (16A) is a bit silly - connectors and so on get warmish. For the next one I'll run it at 12v and about 7A.
Dibond is rated up to 80oC, which means it's fine for PLA, but might not get hot enough for ABS.
I've integrated it into the host software, the G Codes, and the firmware and updated the copies in the repository. I have to go to Cardiff tomorrow to give a RepRap talk to the British Computer Society, but I hope to put all the details on the wiki over the weekend.
Labels: dibond, heated bed, Mendel
