Will adding an ooze shield be benificial when printing with ABS?  

Re: Will adding an ooze shield be benificial when printing with ABS?

Interesting thought. I had never really considered that. I wonder how well it would actually work. It does seem like it would be a huge waste of material.

Re: Will adding an ooze shield be benificial when printing with ABS?

I understand you're trying to trap the heat from the bed in a smaller area than with a printer box, but I don't believe it will yield the desired result: you're creating an "enclosure" around the print, but the top will still be open, as the ooze shield grows with the object you're printing. As such heat will still escape from it. A printer box on the other hand, is a fully enclosed environment.

Some people have gone the extra miles by making their box essentially a heated build chamber, complete with vents and an active heating element like a hair dryer: http://reprap.org/wiki/Heated_Build_Chamber

Re: Will adding an ooze shield be benificial when printing with ABS?

That is a good point. For really tall prints, I could put a 1mm cylinder or box around the object and then place a top on it every .5 inches. It would be extra material but for really large prints it would less material than a failed print / retry. The bigger issue for me is time loss when a print fails when the print job takes hours or days.

There is the issue of clean up, but many of my parts are functional vs. artistic in nature will never be seen since it will be in a project box.

If this theory is sound, then this could be added option in the slicer software.

A small trade off of MK2 design vs. a 3D delta printer is that the object is always moving and therefore cooling since the bed is moving on 1 axis.

I am also thinking about heating the air in the printer box and that seems like a good way to go at the cost of additional power which is a factor that grows when running prints taking longer than a few hours.