Minimal 3D Printer Air Filtering Enclosure

This is a minimal enclosure to serve the purpose of capturing all the fumes created by a 3D printer into an appropriate air filter. In my case, this is an air filter built for a laser cutter, but 3D printing specific filters work similarly.

It's essentially a box with 4 walls (3 sides and the top) covered with plastic wrap, and a magnetic snap-on door panel.

For reference, my 3D printer is a Bambu Labs A1 with the AMS Lite 4-spool material feed system. Ideally the AMS lite should go adjacent to the printer, not behind it as I've done, but I was constrained to the top of a 2' x 4' table so I couldn't orient my printer the other way.

The design objectives here were:

1. Cheap and quick to build
2. Easy to see what's going on with the printer, and physically access it quickly
3. Just enough containment of the air space so that all the fumes end up in the filter and not leaking into the room. This means there can be small gaps, as long as the filter suction distributed across the gaps is enough to overcome the convection of plastic fumes and warm air from the build plate rising

Materials:

1. An air filter designed for plastic fumes, with a flexible intake duct. Example. ~$75
2. 14 1/2" x 48" dowels. I laid a bunch on the floor at Home Depot to pick the straightest ~$2.50 x 14 =$35.00
3. Furniture wrap or Saran Wrap (I've only used the former, which might be significantly stronger)
4. Small rare-earth magnets for holding the door on, at least 8, 8x2mm. Can be purchased from Bambu Labs ~$3
5. A set of 12 3D printed dowel junctions, and at least 4 magnet holding clips. See attached design files.

Tools:

1. Hacksaw or hand saw or other tool for cutting dowels
2. Pencil & tape measure
3. Vice grips or a vice for press-fitting the magnets into sockets
4. Optional, hot glue gun

Decide on the geometry of your enclosure. It's probably easiest to go with 48" on one side, particularly if you have equipment besides your 3D printer that you also want in the enclosure, so you have less dowels to cut.

For the 14 dowels, I have assumed that one side of your enclosure is < 24", and the other side >24". If you can squeeze into a 24" x 24" footprint, then you can save yourself 3 dowels!

To be really general, we'll refer to the door-side-length and non-door-side lengths.

1. Make 6 dowels that are the door-side-length. The actual dowel length should match the *inner* size that you need.
2. Make 4 dowels that are the non-door-side length. The actual dowel length should match the *outer* enclosure size you need; the useable interior dimension will be about 1" less because these dowels will extend into the 3D printed junctions
3. Make 6 dowels that are the enclosure height, outer dimension. You can also leave these uncut if you like avoiding commitment or sawing.

Using the finished enclosure images as a reference, assemble the enclosure frame and the door. It's easiest to

1. build the bottom first, then
2. add the uprights, and then
3. slide the top junctions into place and add the cross-pieces

Optionally, use hot glue to secure the dowel ends into the junctions, which may have variably-good friction fits. However, know that we'll be adding the furniture wrap to hold everything in place anyway.

There's a trick to doing this so the wrap stays in place and you minimize air gaps.

1. Do the ceiling first. You can wrap this one spiral-style to cover it all with a continuous sheet, or do several straight overlapping wraps. You may want to fold another couple sheets over the ends of the tube created by your main wraps, to seal off those edges.
2. Next do, the 3 sides. Think about where you start and where you end so that you can get all 3 in a single sheet wrapping horizontally. When the wrap goes around a dowel and presses against itself, it will adhere if there's enough contact surface area. You can do several overlapping passes to get complete top-to-bottom coverage, and overlap the very top a bit so you can fold it over/around the edges to avoid gaps and maintain tension.
3. Finally, do the door (now that you've gotten good at this). You can approach it about the same as you did the ceiling panel.

Use vice grips to mash magnets into the sockets on the magnet clips. NOTE! You'll need to pay careful attention to the orientation of the magnets. They should be the same within a given clip, and then you'll need 2 mating pairs, which means that for 2 of the clips the magnets should be inserted in the opposite orientation compared to the other two. This way, the magnet-sides of the pairs of clips will stick to each other.