@wingnut
I didnt really find it complicated. Its just a few cuts and drill holes mostly for a few bits. Looking at that link those beds have issues. I will cover a few quickly.
1) Adding a thermal fuse means you reduce the risk of waking up to a fire in the middle of the night, or a melted printer. That was really important to me,
2) There is a large air gap between the PCB and the glass, so the glass temperature would vary compared to the bed. Also the heat won't be transfered as well. My bed has no gap at all.
3) There is no strain relief on the wiring so it can break over time. I guess i was going for low maintianance there.
4) I chose to add a switcher so I could get more power in with "common" power supplies. I thought being a able to adjust the bed power was pretty cool too, I was not sure how much power I needed.
5) The bed described has warpage issues as it heats. With the aluminium plate mine will stay much flatter and have better thermal inertia too. I won't be putting my bulldog clips on the PCB either. This was very important. The pockets take care of that.
6) The thermal break layer means a lot of energy won't be lost and the termperature will be more stable, especially in changing ambient conditiions.
7) The tufnol layer is also important as the mounting screws will get hot and you wouldnt want them to move if mounted in acrylic. The acrlic layer at the bottom of the bed could also deform so tufnol takes care of that too.
Another note I forgot to mention. I do plan to print ABS and nylon so the bed could be run quite hot.
I do tend to build things better than I need to, but I look at this as a workshop machine that needs to work on demmand and be low maintainance. That's part of the reason mine is belt drive too. I will see how it turns out.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/05/2013 07:39PM by Robonz.
