I had a couple of objects where I wanted a really flat, clean bottom side, which is hard to archive when printing on a raft with your RepRap/RepMan. So I wanted to have one of these heated printbeds where you do not need a raft - the objects stick to it directly and due to the heat they do not shrink while printing avoiding the warping problem ABS has which would cause the edges to come off the printing surface otherwise.
But I did not like spending lots of money in a machined metal table. I'll probably will get one now, but for trying it out and playing around I looked for something cheaper.
So here is my (roughly) 10$ heated printbed design. You need:
- flat piece of wood board
- a proto-board with stripes (something like this)
- Kapton tape
- old PC power supply
I soldered bridges onto the protoboard so that the whole board is covered by one long zig-zag ciruit. With my board size of 160x100mm (Euro card size) this resulted in about 2.5 Ohms. Attaching that to 5V resulted in about 60°C which is is not enough, but with 12V it was at about 90°C, which proved to be enough.
I covered the board with Kapton so that the holes are covered and ABS sticks much better to it. I mounted the proto-board on the wooden board using little wooden pieces as spacers which I covered with a few layers of Kaption tape for insulation. I wrapped some Kapton all around the proto-board and the wooden board which proved to be enough to hold it in place. I glued the wooden board onto the print bed mount of the RepMan using double-sided take. Pay attention to what take you use, mine was really hard to get off again.
In case you wonder, my proto-board was broken, so I soldered it together again. Made a bit of trouble, because it was not flat any more.
So does this work? Yes, I was able to print a couple of nice objects with it.
However, there are a couple of cons:
- The prints stick really well. This is good, but you have to wait for the printbed to cool down before attempting to get the print off, otherwise the object will get bent. Once I was ripping the proto-board off the wooden board while trying to get the print off. Also the Kapton tape came off easily.
- I had problems to get the printbed flat. Mostly because of the broken proto-board so that probably a problem that could be avoided easily.
- 100x160mm is enough for many objects, but if you have a RepMan you could do much larger prints. When using larger proto-boards the resistance will be different, so you need either a higher voltage or you need a different way to connect the stripes on the board. Either way you probably need a higher rated power supply.
- The proto-board started smelling funny. I think it was a really cheap one (don't know, I used one I had lying around) so this could be avoided by using a better, more heat-resistant one.
It was a fun experiment and useful for smaller prints. But I guess I get something better now.
