Yet another enclosure for a Mk4
I run my Mk4 on my desktop to the left of my computer, and I wanted to build the minimum-sized enclosure for it. I made the back half out of 6 mm birch plywood with cherry frame members, to support the dry box above.
The dry box holds four 1 kg. reels, has a gasketed lid and 200 grams of desiccant (dry) inside. For each reel, the filament is routed through a short teflon tube fitting on the front of the box, then goes bare to the print head through a 2 mm slot on the top of the enclosure that runs the width of the print bed. Fresh desiccant typically yanks the relative humidity down to 11%, and when that climbs to 20% or so, (takes about 2-3 months), I dry the desiccant bags in my air fryer at 150 DegC for 90 minutes.
The front half of the enclosure was made out of a 5 mm clear PETG sheet sold at Home Depot in the USA (labeled as Acrylic, but that's PMMA, not PETG). All corner clips and hinges were designed in FreeCAD, and printed with leftover Prusament PETG from my kit upgrade to a Mk4 configuration from my kit-made Mk 3S. The outer dimension of the entire enclosure is 500 mm wide, by 520 mm deep, by 400 mm high. To minimize that depth, I redesigned the heater bed connector to go cross-bed, rather than straight back (second pic).
I put in three doors, one on the back half of the clear top for easy access to the print head (hinges forward), and a "saloon pair" in the front, large enough to slide the printer out of the enclosure for maintenance. I put in a strip of LEDs for lighting, and a temp-humidity gauge. No active heating (yet), and the air inside runs 6-8 DegC above ambient when printing PETG. Next step is to add a vent fan ducted to a near-by window for printing ASA and other nasty filaments.
