Noah B Woodworks

Over the last week or so, I’ve been printing pieces to an upgrade to my 3D printer. I purchased my 3D printer on a black Friday sale last year and it cost $250 marked down from $350. It’s a FlashForge Adventurer 5M. 3D printing nerds might already know that you can modify this machine and FlashForge sells an enclosure kit where they send the hardware and acrylic panels, then you 3D print the parts for the enclosure. This mod gives the printer all of the bells and whistles of the higher end machines at a lower cost.

There are a few benefits to this that really help quality of life: It reduces the noise of the machine, it helps regulate the temperature of the machine, which is important in 3D printing, and it keeps some of the fumes from escaping into the air. Albeit, I’m skeptical as to how effective that last point is, but we’ll see. I often like to print things overnight, and I had put a towel under the door in my office to keep some of the high frequency noise from entering into our bedroom. It’s an annoying thing to listen to when the house is quiet and we’re trying to sleep.

I’ll attach a picture of the enclosure from 5M, I forgot to take a picture of my modded machine. It looks sweet but took forever and a day to build. Printing the parts took a total of 2 and a half days of printing time. Then removing all of the support structures took 2 or 3 hours yesterday. Figuring out how to assemble and build the enclosure kit took another 2 to 3 hours. A lot of cursing and frustration later, the mod was done. I ran a print last night and it really does help tame that high frequency noise so you don’t notice from 20 feet away.

Next on the list of 3D printing things to-do is finish making the gridfinity for my office, and I’m not really sure what’s next after that. I’ve got some ideas for projects to do for work, as I’m still trying to convince them that we should get a 3D printer for the engineering shop. I might try to do more upgrades to the camera like making a motorized slider but we’ll see. I’d like to print some pointy pyramids that will help with finishing. I can put 2-4 of these down on the workbench flat, place the workpiece on top, and they’ll allow air to get underneath workpieces as the finish dries. That’ll take no time at all though, and are good for using up the ends of spools.