Heated bed or not?
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Hi!
I'm working on a new CoreXY printer which will be full metal, with a heated chamber, in order to print materials such as ABS or POM...
My question is: do I need a heated bed, as it will be heated up by the hot air in the enclosure?
Using a bed with a low thermal inertia would then be a good idea. Any suggestion?
What do you think?
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Can you get the chamber to the recommended bed temp? Sounds like it would be slow or windy?
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Hi Frédéric,
I've built a high temperature, enclosed and actively heated 3D printer that does just what you are suggesting - heating up the print volume with a chamber heater, without a heated bed. When I started out I had a heater for the bed installed, but I found that it only accelerated the time for heating the build volume by a little bit. No wonder since it was around 200 W while the chamber heater is about 1,5 kW. So I took out the bed heater.
I'm using exchangable, plain Aluminium plates which I can coat with tape for adhesion. Others are using vacuum plates to hold down print sheets (e.g. PEI sheets), which aren't heated either of course.
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Great! Thanks for this feedback.
Do you have any pictures of your printer? Are your motors in the heated chamber? If so, are you using specific high temp. motors, or regular ones?
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Hi,
https://blog.igus.eu/do-it-yourself-build-your-own-3d-high-temperature-printer/ We've posted about it on our company blog, and we offer the CAD data as download. It may be that this model still has the "sandwich" plate heated bed, just imagine one instead of two of the shown plates and the Al plate clamped down on top.
The steppers are outside the print volume and the print head/gantry is driven by high pitch lead screws. They are standard steppers, however they directly incorporate the lead screws instead of shaft and coupling. Could be done otherwise.
@bearer with a 1,5 kW heater (from a baking oven) the build volume heats up to 170 °C in under an hour.
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Thanks for the infos!
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I see that you don't use a water-cooled hotend, but I guess the air is blown from the outside. Am I right? Does it work fine?
