If you are 3d printing with ABS you can find it warps, cracks, and basically misbehaves unless you can contain draughts and can maintain constant temperatures. Do you need to spend a fortune on a fancy enclosure? Well, turns out, no, you don’t! In fact, you can get everything you need at IKEA for around $60USD or so.

After posting a picture of my IKEA enclosure I got a lot of questions, ranging from “what the heck is that?” through to “Cool! What are the product codes for that bad boy?”. I therefore felt a blog post was in order.

First take a look at it in all its glory.

It’s fully enclosed, with a glass door for the viewing and for the webcam. It’s large enough that I can still level the bed, though I did the nylock thumb screws upgrade (look out soon for my Wanhao Di3 upgrades post) before doing this so I rarely need to. The power/control block fits outside (don’t want that overheating). I am running the filament through a small hole that already existed in the back panel, and I am using a spare filament guide tube from an old Cube3 spool that broke so nothing gets snagged.

What you need

Firstly, I am not the first to do this, not even the first in Calgary where I live. I am sure you can do better than I did.

The idea came from seeing a couple of guys who did their own IKEA enclosures in the 3d printing Reddit group. One used a stacking system of Lack tables. Another used a double height cabinet. I just wanted to fit the small Wanhao Di3 in mine, and actually the priority criteria was the glass door as I run my printers using Octoprint and I monitor from another room.

After asking the super helpful IKEA lady, this is what we ended up buying for just over $80 CAD:

You will need to cut a small opening in the bottom of the back panel for the cables to the control/power box to fit. I used a Dremel but a hack saw or anything should suffice as it is just that particle board stuff, easy to cut.

What’s next?

It will be interesting to monitor the enclosure temperature so I will be adding a temperature sensor. Maybe using an ATTiny85 and run I2C wire to the Raspberry Pi, or just run it off an ESP8266 via wifi.

As you can tell from the picture, it was quite dark in there so I added some basic lights, also from IKEA.

At some point I will run some RGB LEDs from the Octopi box via the GPIO so I can change the colours based on print events.

Watch this space!