A Novel 3D Printer Enclosure

Overview

This is an enclosure, or cage, for my 3D printer which I designed with an eye towards not burning down the house. I make no claim that it meets any real fire-proofing codes, but I tried to select material which wasn't going to burst into flames easily.

The target 3D printer is an Ender 5 Pro. I suspect the dimensions of this enclosure would work with several different printers. If you simply want to change the size, that is easy to do in the OpenSCAD file. If you want to change the design, as in different number and kinds of doors, you'll need more than a passing familiarity with OpenSCAD.

Background

I've been curious for some time about 3D printers, but never took the plunge until the virus hit. Back in March, a friend of mine pointed out that he was making minuature people, cars, and buildings for his HO-gauge model railroad layout using a $300 printer from China.
I knew the time had come. His model was the Ender 3, but I splurged and got the Ender 5 Pro.

Shortly after receiving my new printer, another friend told me I needed an enclosure, advice that I kept putting off until I realized he was right. After doing a little research, I wasn't really impressed with any of the off-the-shelf solutions. Having an enclosure that was not flammable seemed to be desirable, but many of the popular ones weren't.

I found a discussion on reddit regarding fire-resistant boards which sounded promising. But I wasn't readily able to find any cheaply here in South Korea. I saw some people were using plexiglass, but that's just plastic and would burn. Then suddenly I realized that I could use tempered glass. But I imagined the complex 3D pieces that would join panes of glass together at the corners forming an enclosure, I became discouraged.
Such a scheme would also need to accomodate doors, panels, mounting points for accessories, and I was about to abandon the idea.

Then I had another idea - use the same type of aluminum extrusions that comprised the 3D printer itself as frames for a glass enclosure. This appeared to solve all my objections of custom joinery, and it seemed to me, an electronics engineers, as a doable solution with low-risk of failure. But simple as it seemed, I was concerned about building something like this without a metal working shop.

A bit of an aside, South Koreans are not really into the DIY scene. Finding supplies that would be trivial to get in the US can be challenging, if not impossible here. In addition, without a workshop here, extensive cutting, drilling, etc., is a non-starter. To my surprise, I was quickly able to find what I needed online, from suppliers who did custom orders. There are shops selling aluminum 2020 extrusions cut to custom lengths. I also found a place that would cut sheets of tempered glass to custom sizes, chamfers, and radii on request. With these newly-found resources at my fingertips, I was encouraged to proceed.

See also:

• Assembly instructions guide on assembling the cage
• Installation notes how to install the code, too basic
• Gallery of pictures an index into the pictures directory with some organization
• Vendors used list of vendors and links, useless unless you live in South Korea
• Build log
• Design details
• Datasheets directory (needs a few more datasheets)

Design files:

• cage.scad OpenSCAD file
• cage-bom.xlsx BOM listing
  • cage-bom-*.txt intermediate bom text files generated by OpenSCAD
• cage-panel.dwg (also DXF and PDF files) drawing for basic panel