This is a fully 3D printable
enclosure for your FDM 3D printer, laser cutter, CNC, or resin printer. At least, it will be by
the end of this video. It's fully customizable,
reconfigurable, and super fun to build. And in this video, we're going to
not only see how I made it, but also explore some of the reasons
why you might want to make one too. Let's get after it. With the rising popularity of fully
enclosed 3D printers, we're seeing an increased interest in materials previously
thought difficult to print at home. From ABS to nylon, polycarbonate,
and carbon fiber blends. To wit, I was actually blown away by
the response on my recent advanced filaments video, so if you haven't seen
that, make sure to check it out here. But alas, not everyone has an enclosed
3D printer, and even if you do, you probably still have an open i3 style
bedslinger kicking around somewhere. So, what's a person to do? And what if, like some of us, your
maker hobby includes using resin 3D printers, or CNC machines, or all
other kinds of dangerous things? Well, for that, you're going
to need to build an enclosure. The benefits of having an
enclosure are manifold. Like I mentioned before, without an
enclosure, you'll be hard pressed to print some of the more engineering-grade
materials out there, like nylon or even ABS, without experiencing warping. But beyond protecting your print,
an enclosure also protects you from harmful VOCs and airborne particulate. If you haven't seen the recent video
I did on air quality, well, make sure to check that one out too, because I
think that you, like me, will be quite surprised at just how hazardous the air
in your makerspace can quickly become. Additionally, I find that enclosing my
printers, even my Bambu Lab X1-Carbon at home, is really important for reducing
noise, making it much more pleasant to share a room with the printer. And finally, creating an enclosure,
especially if it's a custom one, provides a backbone for organizing
all your 3D printing accessories, whether it's by adding a honeycomb
storage wall, outfitting the enclosure with lights to aid in the creation
of time lapses, or even any other system to organize all your tools. There's nothing new about
DIY enclosures, though. In fact, the popular IKEA "LACK"
enclosure system has been used for years to enclose bedslinger style
printers, and it's a great choice. Because of its popularity, there are
hundreds, if not thousands of tweaks and upgrades for this clever little system,
and it's super affordable to boot. The problem is, however, that you're
somewhat limited by the dimensions of the IKEA LACK itself, which isn't big. And as you probably know, more and more
3D printer manufacturers from AnyCubic and Elegoo, to the behemoth Comgrow
T500 are creating significantly larger printers right now, while concurrently
some companies like Bambu Lab are trying to make even smaller, quieter
3D printers like the A1M that you'll actually want to share a desk with. And with so many new 3D printers coming
out, It's kind of inevitable that you're going to want to upgrade sometime down
the line, meaning that even if you do build your own custom enclosure like
I did with my cabinetry at home, you might end up with an enclosure that no
longer fits your 3D printer or printers. Again, like I did with
my cabinetry at home. Enter this modular enclosure
by PrintableAccessories. In addition to being fully 3D printable,
it takes advantage of some clever design tricks to create easy to
assemble pieces that are rigid, strong, and actually pretty fun to assemble. More importantly, because you make
it at home, you can build it to any size, customize it with any type
of accessories from LED mounts, air filters, pegboard, and much more. In fact, if you don't have access
to or don't want to spend the money on acrylic panels like these, you
can even 3D print the sides of the enclosure yourself at home. So, what do you say we build
one and see what it's all about? For my build, I decided to print out
this entire thing using PLA which was provided to me by Comgrow, though I
burnt through the entire three kilo spool and I had to use a bunch of
white and black Sovol PLA to finish the job which was provided by Sovol. That's because this entire project, for
an average size enclosure like this, we'll use up about 5 kilos of filament,
and on a faster printer like the Comgrow or Sovol SV07, it's going to take about
four to five days of continuous printing for the frame, and roughly another two
days or so for the acrylic holders and all the accessories, which, frankly, isn't
all that bad, or maybe it's just that my barometer for big 3D printing projects
has become really really ridiculous. Now I know what you're thinking and
yes, you probably want to print the parts out in PETG for their superior
heat resistance, but because I'm not planning on exposing this enclosure to
much heat, more on that in a second, and because I wanted to save all the
PETG I currently have for volunteer 3D printing that I've been doing to help
our soldiers out, I decided to just print it in PLA and see how it would hold up. Printing the parts was relatively
easy, though I did print most of these parts on the Comgrow T500, which, as
you can probably tell, I haven't had time to properly calibrate retractions
on in OrcaSlicer, so I hope you guys won't judge me for the stringing. And I did actually decide to
print a few parts out on my Voron, which would be visible. Because I really wanted to use this
fancy pants pattern build surface from FYSETC and I immediately wished that I'd
printed more of the parts out with it. It would have made a super cool
effect on the entire frame holding the acrylic, but what can you say? By the way, I will also say that I love
that the parts were designed to require almost zero supports outside of the
little nub on the frame and supporting some areas on the acrylic holders. And I also love how they take
advantage of some pretty impressive bridging to reduce material waste. The only inconvenience on the printing
side is that skirts are pretty much necessary for the frame, which created
a lot of extra work that needed to be done before I could start assembling. Now, at first I assumed that because this
was a pre-release product when I built it, there wouldn't be too many instructions. And so I unfortunately wasted a
fair bit of time trying to figure out what goes where on my own. But once I did find the 10 or so
different instruction manuals in the Google Drive folder I was given, oops. Putting this thing together was
honestly a breeze, and to be even more honest, it was actually really fun. While I thought that assembling this
thing would be a royal pain in the butt, there's actually something
super satisfying about how all the different pieces snap together, and
it's actually really amazing to watch as it kind of takes shape and rises up. It's kind of like building
with these massive Lego bricks. Plus, I was genuinely impressed
with just how rigid everything was, even without glue or hardware. Okay, so we've got the bottom done. Actually, I, uh, decided not to glue
any of the pieces or bolt them in. The folks over at, uh, Crate told me
that the bolts are for if you want to be able to disassemble it later, so you can
reconfigure it as a different enclosure of different size using the same pieces
kind of like Lego, for a different printer if you switch your printer. I think I'm going to actually
reconfigure this after this video is done and make an enclosure
for one of my open laser cutters. But check this out even without,
without glue or anything, I mean I can hold it by the corner. Pretty solid. Uh, so I don't think I'm actually even
going to glue it or put in any hardware. I don't see a need. These clips hold it so tightly and
especially once the acrylic gets in, I think it's going to be really, really,
really stable and sturdy to the point where I don't really need, you know. Why waste the time, waste the
hardware and make it even harder to disassemble if I want to reconfigure it. So, uh, let's, uh, continue
building this thing. Yes, you heard that right. In the middle of building this thing
for the Bambu Lab A1 Mini, I actually decided that I'd much rather use it
for my Llonger B1 open air laser,. And then use the optional accessories
to route the exhaust fan to an air purifier that Flux gave me
when I tested out the Flux Beamo. It was at this point that I had an
epiphany, and I really realized the actual key benefit of this system. And it's not the customizability,
though that is cool too. The real benefit is that I can not
only reconfigure the enclosure whenever I want to switch printers, but I can
also treat it the same way as say my gridfinity or honeycomb wall setup. See, because this thing, at least the
frame of it, is so quick and easy to snap together, I can just print out
a bunch of parts, store them in bins, and then whenever I have a project that
needs an enclosure, I can literally just build one in a matter of minutes,
snapping together the pieces to create an enclosure of the desired size. I don't even need to
use expensive acrylic. Let's say for example that I wanted to
create a paint tent to avoid getting dust on a surface when I paint it. I could use this frame and then
either drape disposable clear plastic over it or cut cardboard to size. Or let's say that I want to do
a project where I need to use a lot of toxic chemicals, such
as 3DGloop or some harsh epoxy. I could just quickly build an enclosure
to house them while they dry and put a bento box or a nevermore in there. I bet I could even buy some of those
enclosure mounted gloves like they have in biolabs and mount those to
the side of this for working in there. The possibilities are actually
limitless, but for now, let's get back to actually building a
sample enclosure for this A1 mini. With the entire frame assembled, it
was time to add the acrylic panels. Now obviously you can cut them with
a laser, particularly if you want to cut some very exact holes in order
to add things like bowden couplers, but the easiest way to do it is just
going to be to score the acrylic with a utility knife or better yet a sharp
screwdriver and then just snap it. I actually do have a table saw kicking
around here but when I tried to cut pieces of acrylic with it it fired a
ton of shards at me so I did a lot of the subsequent cuts with a piece of
wood over the acrylic to protect me. Unfortunately, I ordered 60 by 60 pre-cut
acrylic because I thought it would be so much easier to work with than
the alternative, which is 120 by 240, but I quickly realized that I
actually needed 615, not 600 millimeters on one of the sides. Fortunately, I also discovered that
the PET version of Gloop works really well for solvent bonding acrylic. So while the small seam you can see
here in the back isn't beautiful, I can just put it back here
where no one's going to see it. So with my acrylic sheets cut and ready,
I was ready to actually mount the acrylic. Now this is done or supposed to be
done with machine screws and bolts, which are integrated into the design in
such a way that you don't actually see them behind the acrylic sheet holders. But because I'd already decided to
break this thing down, and because I honestly didn't have a chance to
get the exact right hardware due to the security situation here in
Israel, I actually chose to put in the minimum amount of hardware possible. And in doing so, I actually realized that
you can just glue the acrylic holders in place without fear of making this
thing less modular or reconfigurable. Because if you ever want to reconfigure
it, then you can just disassemble it by actually taking apart the
frame and sliding the acrylic out. And if you're worried about the
strength of gluing these parts on, don't be. I use 3DGloop, and if you've
ever done the same, you know that strength is not the issue. As we speak, I'm actually still printing
out a few of the cosmetic parts that you can see here for the front area,
so let me go ahead and finish those, install them, and then we'll take a
look at the finished product in 3 2 1. ..
So there you have it. This enclosure is fully 3D printable,
and that's cool and all, but personally, I think what's much cooler about it is
the fact that you can fully reconfigure it like so many of the other 3D printing
projects and standards that I like. I personally can't wait to
see what types of upgrades, integrations, and modifications
people come up with for this system. And personally, I'm going to be
keeping a bin of these parts around here alongside some pre-cut sizes of
acrylic for whenever I want to enclose a specific resin printer, or FDM
printer, laser cutter, or just any tool. But what do you think? I'd love to hear in the comments below. Is this something you'd
see yourself building? And by the way, if it is, the project
is currently live on KickStarter and the designs are, as you can see, all ready. So I do feel comfortable saying
that you'll actually get the product if you back this campaign. Thanks so much to PrintedAccessories
for sponsoring this build, to Sovol and Comgrow for providing all this filament,
thanks to my Patreon and YouTube members, and thanks to all of you for watching. And an extra special thanks to
our Nylon and Peak members Chip Cox, 2 Krazy Ketos, and Amir Chen. Thank you guys so much. That's all for this week, but I'll
see all of you on The Next Layer.
