Show off your 3D printed parts

I need some advice on what to do here. I was warming up the bed when the main power terminal caught on fire today. I've had this printer for years, and I've never had anything like this happen before. The board looks fine, but the terminal is toast. Should I replace the board to be on the safe side, or should I just solder a new terminal to the board? This happened on an flsun 3d cube. Let this be a reminder to stay on your toes, especially with these chinese DIY kits.

 

Seems like a good excuse to upgrade your board to me

That's terrifying though, lucky you were able to catch it before it burned more.

 

I don't know about your printer but on my ender 3 I had to upgrade for thermal runaway protection. Would be worth looking into once you make repairs.

 

I've heard from others I could actually just solder the wires straight to the board, which is what I think I'll try for now. Frankly I'm 100% inept when it comes to software for these things, so I'm not sure I'd be able to get it up and running again with a new board.
But yeah, I've had this thing for about 3 years, never an electrical or mechanical issue. I've left the printer to do it's thing while I wasn't around before, but now I'm going to be pretty paranoid about it. No warnings or anything, just a bright light, then fire. Luckily just unplugging the printer put it out.

 

I've heard people use mosfets for that, is what you're talking about?

 

Not the same thing, therman runaway protection is an actual auto shutoff kind of thing. I put a mosfet on the bed of my wanhao duplicator i3 clone (monoprice version), which just lowers the chances of it catching on fire like yours did.

edit: more of an explanation on the mosfet:

Rather than the amperage needed to heat up the bed flowing through your board, it goes a separate beefier mosfet. The board essentially then just acts as a relay to control the mosfet. With it you wire in heavier gauge wires going from the power supply to the mosfet and use terminals that are actually able to handle the amps needed to heat the bed up.

 

The firmware will basically detect when the power supply is sending more power than it should be to perform a task and shut down. So if you have a short and it's trying to heat the bed, and it's not warming up it will turn off to prevent fire.

https://all3dp.com/2/thermal-runaway-3d-printer-marlin-thermal-runaway-protection/

 

@Jojee117
Thermal runaway would not have helped in this situation. This was not caused by a short. The wires may eventually short if they touch after the insulation burns off, but by then the fire has already started. The terminals on the board are not rated for the amperage that the bed is pulling. That means the terminal will have resistance and that develops heat and that heat eventually turns to fire. Likelihood is that if you touched the terminal while printing it was hot. Soldering the wires to the board is a better solution than putting another underrated terminal on the board, but one wonders if that's the only short coming of the board.

As for printing while not home. A raspberry pi and a webcam gives you the ability to monitor your printer visually from anywhere in the world. There are even options that will allow you to turn off power to the printer from remote locations, and if the raspberry pi is connected to your printer software like Octoprint has plugins that can do that automagically.

And then there is one of the last lines of defense. Self deploying fire extinguishers. These have a fuse that requires actual flame to ignite. Seconds after that fuse is ignited it will dump a flame retardant onto anything below it. They're not specifically noted for use on electrical fires, but my research showed several electrically rated extinguishers using the same flame retardant medium. Also don't keep flamable things by your printer like paper, aerosol cans, oily rags, etc.

https://stovetopfirestop.com/product/rangehood/

 

Thanks for the education, I never put together that the firmware wouldn't be able to detect the increased resistance. I've yet to pull the trigger on firestops but I've had them in my price watch list since I bought my ender.

 

Wonder if anyone has ever through about designing a are intake tube to 3d print in ABS. Have no idea how to use cad or anything 3d but that would be cool to get a tube created to connect to the stock airbox and delete the resonator. much like this..

 

Well this was nerve racking to peel up

 

Final product, not perfect but I'm happy with it.

 

My new part cooling fan came in today.

 

If you can't tell, I'm just getting started with 3D Printing, but here's a quick little gizmo to fix what I call the "wandering cable" problem.
My Iphone USB cable always wants to move out of that semi-useful groove in the center console. Here's a little thing that keeps it put.

 

You got that lower portion incredibly smooth considering it was full of support material and not sitting directly on the bed. Impressive. Filler, sanding and paint? The whole thing has a very natural textured plastic look.

 

Printed up a 3/4" dimple die out of carbon fiber nylon.

 

Whoa!

 

Thanks! Yes mostly block sanding then filler primer and paint.

The textured black krylon is a great match to the factory plastic. I originally tried one of the hammered paints to layer underneath the black but didn't like it.

 

I'm telling ya, I'm starting to think that they are just pulling specifications out of their butts in china. 4 cfm fans blowing more than 10 cfm fans. Tiny fans moving more air and pressure than larger fans. So frustrating...

 

Been a while since iv read through this thread. That center console/shifter bezel looks awesome!

I'm always looking for more tacoma stuff to print if yall have any ideas.

Here is my last print, not tacoma related. But still cool I think.