Printer on fire... well, almost

It appears after 3-4kg of printing, one of my power cables must have worked a bit loose... Having recently done a 36 hour print, I feel very lucky I happened to be in the room when the smoke started.
Check your cables people!
Is there any way of resurrecting this power board? If not, any chance of a replacement?

Oh my.....
You can solder the wires straight on to the board if your ok with soldering....
I haven't seen a similar problem on here yet so that's a first.

I'm printing on a Large Harbour Tug at the moment and we are getting some real heavy vibrations pushing a Super Tanker into port.
So I'll be checking mine when the print finishes..

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Please send me a PM if you have suggestions, or problems with Big Blue 360.
I won't see comments in threads, as I move around to much.
Working Link to Big Blue 360 Complete

My little local electrical shop had a replacement for the green power terminal connector thingy for all of 55 euro cents. Replaced and printing again already - but on the look out for a spare smoke alarm just in case!

And a FireWoman.....

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Please send me a PM if you have suggestions, or problems with Big Blue 360.
I won't see comments in threads, as I move around to much.
Working Link to Big Blue 360 Complete

Did you use the supplied crimp connectors, just bare wires, or soldered wire-ends? The crimp connectors are probably the most reliable, provided they're done right (and if not, anything getting hot would probably be inside the connector). Bare wires can work loose, and exactly that kind of thing can happen (and all that current going through a few individual copper strands can generate a lot of heat).

The assembly instructions mention putting solder on the ends of the cable instead of bare copper strands if you don't have a crimp tool, but I'm not sure that's a good idea. Solder is very soft and will slowly move under pressure, so if you just let it sit it will eventually become loose.

That was lucky!

I was going to add a fuse to my new PSU box when I finally hook it all up, but maybe I should add some form of thermistor circuit to check for excess heat too!

Regards,

Les

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Quote
Pointy
That was lucky!

I was going to add a fuse to my new PSU box when I finally hook it all up, but maybe I should add some form of thermistor circuit to check for excess heat too!

Regards,

Les

Yup - a fuse won't help with heat cause by a loose connection! The best precaution is simply to re-tighten the terminal screws every now and then - or even better, replace the terminal blocks with a more reliable connector (or as Kim suggests, solder the wires to the boards).

Dave
(#106)

I recommend replacing the supplied stranded wire with a short length of 2.5mm2 solid core twin-and-earth wire.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].