Heat Lamps vs Enclosure for ASA and ABS

[Jeff Ratner]

I just saw a post in a facebook 3D printing group about printing with ASA or ABS. They were discussing needing an enclosure and someone commented that he uses heat lamps placed 20 inches away from the build plate which eliminates the need for an enclosure. I haven't tried it yet but it seems to have merit. Anyone try something like this? 

[LukeH]

I had a printer a couple of years ago where I had built an enclosure around it and installed a thermostat controller and a ceramic heat lamp bulb (a little different to the picture, it uses ceramic thermal mass and heats by both radiation and convection). It was mostly because my printer was in a garage that got down to maybe 20 degrees F in winter, and I kept getting heater faults, but it also worked to heat soak for ABS.

The thing to remember for printing materials like ASA and ABS that warp is that the warping happens worst when different parts of the model cool and shrink  at different rates (because different parts have different surface areas and volumes). The point of the heater is to make the air temperature in the enclosure high enough so that no part of the model cools down faster than the other parts to minimise warping (which is why you print ABS without a cooling fan). Radiant heating alone from one angle might make the warping worse, rather than better. The entire chamber needs to be held at the same temperature, which requires your heater to have some thermal mass, or there be enough thermal mass inside the enclosure (metal, glass, stone, etc.) to absorb the radiated heat and heat hold the air in the enclosure to a warm, steady temperature..

[Luke Hartfiel]

Importantly though, you don’t want to use a convection heater (one that pushes the warm air around using a fan, since again, moving air might make the problem worse, rather than better.

Also, if you are going to use a heater in an enclosure, you might consider making sure you look at moving your electronic components to be outside the heated area, since control boards and RPis don’t react well to being baked in an oven. Even stepper motors don’t like getting too hot, but they are pretty hardy, as long as you aren’t running them at too high a current (which means you may be printing slower than you want to to avoid skipping steps).

On 17 Mar 2023, at 6:30 am, LukeH <lhar...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Levi Smith]

For what it's worth as a point of reference, I had good luck with ABS on my Ender 3 in a cheap fabric enclosure in my garage in the winter with no heaters other than the printer and a filament dryer.  

Found out that the printer and the dryer have firmware settings that don't let them start if their temp is below freezing.  But if you bring them inside for a few minutes to get above freezing, then take them out and fire them up and they stayed happy.

Levi

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[Luke Hartfiel]

I use to get yelled at by my wife for using her expensive hair dryer to pre-heat the bed and hot end to get them working in the cold… :)

A print bed, especially the more powerful ones that run of 110VAC (or 240VAC, depending on where you live), can quite comfortably heat an enclosure to 40-ish degrees Celsius, without and supplementary cooling, which is all you probably need for ABS/ASA (as long as your bed is at around 100 degrees Celsius). The trick is to leave the printer sit after the print is finished and the bed turns off, and let the enclosure come down to room temperature slowly.

Importantly, if your hot end uses a fan to cool the heat sink (like probably 95% of open source printers), then if you heat the air in the enclosure much more than 40 degrees you are going to have issues with heat creep. Printing, say, polycarbonate in a chamber heated to 70 degrees gives awesome results (since it t reduces warping and internal stresses), but that would normally required a water cooled heat sink.

On 17 Mar 2023, at 7:22 am, Levi Smith <levig...@gmail.com> wrote:



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