Finally built myself a nice 3D printer enclosure from IKEA cabinets.
Basic idea is to take a shallow (20cm) and a deep (40cm) cabinet frames and to stagger the bottom/top panels and wall panels, making a nice single-piece 60cm cube. A bit more info with a short how-to and a few ideas and nuances.
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How is the fire safety?
My concern with IKEA enclosures is that they’re made of mostly cardboard and anything catching fire will easily spread around.
Looks good! Long ago I bought 3 LACK tables with the hopes of making an enclosure for my old Artillery Sidewinder before realizing I hadn’t measured correctly and that my small “50mm” extension pieces would need to be more like a ridiculous 50cm to fit everything inside and scrapped the plan. Eventually I got enclosed printers so it didn’t really matter.
My Swedish brain could not make sense of that. But it finally clicked: BESTÅ.
For my old Prusa i3 MK2 I had two LACK-tables on top of eachother, with acrylic from their cheapest picture frames for sides.
I rocked the Lack setup for years with my Mk3s. I finally had to give it up since I needed to reconfigure my setup and the Lack no longer worked for it. I do sort of miss it though.
I love how you offset the 20/40 frames, much better than my design
You can also just use an IKEA Platsa cabinet, which that depth already.
That would have been even easier, but looks like those cabinets are not sold in US or Canada. (Search turns up hardware and/or other storage cabinets)
The issue I have with the enclosures I see that most people design for themselves is the complete lack of ability to have easy access for maintenance and repairs.
It’s can be a royal pain in the butt to pull your printer out to do simple tasks for maintenance so you put things off until you end up have bigger problems that are harder and more expensive to fix.
Good point, that never crossed my mind. Maybe because it’s an Ender 3 so most things are reachable from the front. And for power supply or motherboard connections, I have to flip it upside down anyway.
My last enclosure was a plastic bin upside down, lifted by rope and pulleys, and that needs lots of clearance upwards and was more of a pain than a cabinet.
A very good rule is to think about the poor schmuck that’s going to need to fix whatever you design because you might be the schmuck that ends up fixing it.
Always wanted to do the same but disassemble the printer and build it into the box. It wouldn’t be too hard to do with most drop table printers, and it’d be uniquely good for flying gantry because you could embed tracks in the box.
Plus, with a little router work and some custom pieces, you could make it look like an old Mid-Century TV and that would be cute.
I’ve thought of building a Voron, a RatRig or another printer that can for inside its own rectangular frame into a cabinet too.
90’s “media centers” that were rigid enough and deep enough to fit large CRT TVs might be a good fit for a printer enclosure too (if you can transport them to your residence that is).
Oh man, one of my white whales is getting one of those sturdy old media centers and turning the whole thing into a combined printer/cnc/laser with attached console and storage. Huge build area, head swapping, and all the gear you could ever need in a gaudy wall of wood grain and brass fixtures.
You write in your “bit more info” link that you setup this to protect yourself from the fumes of ABS. But if you have no ventilation from inside the cabinet to the outdoors, you will breathe those fumes the second you open the door to the cabinet?
