I am sensitive even to PLA Toxic fumes, and I need to have an enclosure for my MK4S  

I am sensitive even to PLA Toxic fumes, and I need to have an enclosure for my MK4S

Hello,

last week I did another long print of about 6 hours, and guess what.... towards the evening I started to have a sore throat again. It felt like burning my mouth, and this lasted until the next day. Since it already happened to me several times, I'm now sure that I'm sensitive to fumes or particles from printing. Imagine that I was using simple PRUSAMENT PLA, nothing special. Imagine if I had used those awful smelling PLAs.

At this point I'm convinced that I need to use an enclosure on the MK4S. I looked at the PRUSA Enclosure but it costs almost as much as half a MK4S 😮 , so i decided to build one myself, and to start with I'll build an IKEA Enclosure which is quite simple.

However neither the IKEA enclosure nor the PRUSA Enclosure are airtight. I studied the PRUSA filter, and it simply filters the internal air, and re-introduces it inside (theoretically purified), but particles still pass through the myriad of spaced parts and surfaces that are not sealed.

Same thing for the IKEA Enclosure, whose Plexiglass is about 2 mm away from the wood. So I opted for the definitive solution: reuse the hole in my window glass where I connect the air conditioner in the summer, to connect an exhaust tube that will be connected to the IKEA enclosure.

The secret is that if I can keep the box under atmospheric pressure even for a fraction of a BAR this will prevent the fumes from coming out from the holes in the box and enter in the room, because all the air will be sucked in by the tube connected to the extractor.

To test the idea I built the crudest of enclosures: IKEA Lack as table, with the MK4S on top, with an IKEA stool (from which I removed the seat) on top of the Lack.

The stool is large as the Lack and so the MK4S can be fit inside. The bars of the stool legs act like the poles of a camping tent. I wrapped sheets of polyethylene made from garbage bags around the poles, all held in place with tape. A piece of cardboard with a circular hole on the back, supports a plastic jar cut in two, where the screw-on lid has been drilled and acts as a bolt to screw the jar/tube into the cardboard. On the front I put a transparent sheet of flexible PVC with magnets as a door.

I bought an adjustable PWM vacuum turbofan and two 10 cm diameter tubes on Amazon and connected everything to the jar/tube.

The concept works perfectly. It is enough just to keep it at speed 1 (with the motor that you can't even hear) and it already creates enough vacuum to not let out odours. I did a 7-hour print without the slightest odour.

Now that it passed the test, I moved on to rework on the CAD the parts of the IKEA Lack Enclosure and print them.

Work in progress.... 😀 

Regards