Soundproofing my 3D Printer

My 3D printer is a noisy beast and as well as irritating me, it stops SWHMBO from enjoying her serial killers (in the quiet bits) in the lounge above my cellar.

So I had a go at making an enclosure. The printer is a Prusa I3 clone (from Factory3D) and I made the enclosure out of (mainly) what I had on hand.

The base is 12mm MDF, the sides, back and top are 12mm pine tongue and groove panelling and the front is a mixture of some 5 mm ply and a door made of some rexroth 20mm strut with a 2mm perspex sheet (so I can see when it goes wrong ...). Sides, top, back and the non-door part of the front are covered in 25mm acoustic foam (basically sponge with grooves in). It's 50cmx50cm square and about 65cm high.

I am getting some attenuation. With the door shut I'm getting about 45dB (measured by my phone). With it open, I see about 55dB. I didn't measure before I put it in the box, but I would think I'm seeing at least 5 - 10dB just from being in the box.

But it's still noisier than I'd like.

Is there anything I can do (cheaply!) to improve this? I've tried throwing a blanket over various parts but it seems to make little difference. Should I have put more battens in to stiffen the panelling?

Or anything else!

Thanks in anticipation

Iain

Where is the noise coming from?

I changed my noisy fans for silent ones, big improvement.

I've also put TL smoothers on the stepper motors.

The printers sit on 1" thick granite pieces, isolated from the table they sit on by rubber pads. This does stop a lot resonance.

Jim

The main noise is the motor noise, especially after being boxed. At the moment the whole thing is sitting on a filing cabinet which may not be helping with resonance!

What's a TL smoother?

The granite sounds like a fine idea, but not within the 'cheaply' category .

Thanks

Iain

Open cell Foam line the inside of the box.

Linre the inside of the enclosure with egg boxes ? Probably not practical but may spark off other ideas.

With an enclosure I found temp build up/ control a complication.

Placing the printer on a high density coarse felt ( a bit like carpet underlay) ,made a massive difference. I think it came from the packaging of a new washing machine.

Anyway I recommend you experiment ( cheaply) along these lines.

Bituminous panels stuck on all the internal surfaces, then thick carpet stuck onto the bitumen.

Be careful about heat build-up in the box, although it might help if printing nylon for example.

Thanks all.

The box is lined with 'Acoustic Foam'. though I'm not convinced it's doing a lot...

I will try and find something to put under box - probably the most effective change (that's cheap!).

I have a hole near the bottom to let the mains in (and my fingers to turn it on and off) and a fan near the top - though I I've not yet seen a need to connect it up - general air flow seems enough.

Iain

Depends what main board you have but you could change the drivers to TMC2208 or 2209, they make the motors quieter, I printed some holders for half squash balls, the printer sits on them on the dining table, that is ok for watching the TV in the same room with out an enclosure.

My understanding of TL smoothers is to improve finish on the printed part, modern mainboards and drivers tend to make them redundant.

Some folk use a flat paving slab as a base but I found the half squash balls are ok.

Edited By Henry Brown on 30/04/2023 19:12:04

Egg boxes are the poor man's equivalent to the foam cones used in anechoic chambers. The idea is that they reflect very little sound, and what is reflected is in another direction, probably onto another "dead" surfrace.

If you have ever been in an anechoic chamber, you will know what a strange sensation is experienced. Suddemly, you hear your breath rasping, and your gut girgling; while a spanner dropped onto a metal floor is almost silent!

Foam is very good at absorbing high frequencies, low frequencies need tom be tuned out, or reflected by mrelatively dead surfaces as to gradually diminish to almost inaudibility.

But when making an anechoic enclosere, do allow for the need for ventilation!

Howard

Hi Iain,

I had a factory3d printer and found that a lot of the noise was transmitted through the base into whatever it was standing on - rubber feet helped.

I don't know how old your printer is, but when I went to re-download the support package I discovered that there was a newer version. The relevant point here is that the new version has two rods which brace the top of the aluminium frame (STL models for the new top/bottom brackets are in the download). These dampen vibrations in the frame, which improves print quality but also lowered the noise coming from the frame.

A word of warning - I built a simple enclosure for mine as I was trying to print ABS parts for my next printer. It worked well but then I started to get problems maintaining Z height over the bed, bed levelling and other nasty problems. Eventually discovered that the rise in temperature inside the enclosure coupled with the local heat from the Z steppers and extruder motor were enough to cause the mounting brackets for these motors to sag. They didn't melt as such, just sagged a little more each time it was used - the glass transition point for PLA is only 60 degrees. I ended making aluminium brackets for these parts and had no further heat problems.

BTW, these best upgrade I did was to double up the wiring from the PSU to the RAMPS board and from the RAMPS to the bed heater - with the supplied wiring I was barely getting 10v on the bed. It made a huge difference to the startup times.

Keith

Granite? Concrete should be as effective, possibly more so, and would be a lot cheaper; plus you can cast a slab the size and shape necessary.

(I understand some modern machine-tool beds are steel-plate fabrications filled with a special breed of concrete.)