Renting? Still Want to 3D Print?

I Rent, But I Want To Do Stuff!

First, hi Michael (Teaching Tech) here's a thing I started for my little workbench/workshop and I hope it'll give you (and of course all of you, my readers) a few ideas for setting up non-destructively / non-invasively if you're renting but still want to have a decent 3D printing experience. 

This is going to be a quick article, as I'm posting it as a response to Michael's new makerspace video from a few days ago. In it he mentioned not having a cat door yet to let ventilation / extraction air out. If  my setup were near the sliding door, I'd use this commercially available cat door insert, replace the upper glass panel with MDF, and print some vent outlets for myself:

Commercially Available
Cat Door Section

As I'm in one half of a small bedroom (with my wife sharing the space for her craft and textiles work) however, I get one of the smallish windows and chose to go the following way: 

I printed a few things to help, and used some MDF to completely block the window opening.

As you can see there's an MDF panel that fills the entire window space (we have two windows so it's no loss of airflow and also - see next) and roughly spray painted it, and installed another cat port so our pampered cats can tear through and disturb us entirely at their leisure. The front yard is fully enclosed cat-proof so this is their exercise area. You'll see a desk port for cables, I run an extension cord outside there, a CAT5 for a security camera, and an audio cable to a set of decent computer speakers outside so we can play music when we're out there. 

And yes, there's also a plastic recycling workbench out there on the veranda in the enclosed section, where I hope one day I'll have the wherewithal to buy a plastic shredder and maybe an extruder/injector to make recycled plastics filaments and all sorts of useful items. If you want to help me reach my dream, go to the footer and see what you can do to get involved.

I printed a mount for a 120mm computer fan to draw air into the room (with a panel that can be rotated to cover the opening to keep drafts out in the winter) and a second adaptor on the half-height grille to attach some of that flexible pool hose that you get with every cheap pool with those toy filter pumps. This pool hose goes to a fitting for a 40mm 24V fan (not pictured, will take pic another day) that draws air out of the printer cabinet to put fumes outside.

You can see the grilles I bought at Bunnings (Aussie hardware store chain) at the top of the exterior shot. Future plans include running the fume extractor hose through a separate housing/diverter that includes an activated charcoal filter element and then one side will extract air from the printer, the other will take air from my workbench in the form of a printed vent that will draw away solder fumes and run them over the charcoal too. 

I can't stress this enough, as a person with COPD - there's no real safe exposure to plastic fumes and VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) and I also work with recycling plastics, and the only way for smaller operations to safely clean those fumes out of the air is activated charcoal filtering. Luckily there are panels of all sizes used as sub-micron, gas, and even HEPA filters for vacuum cleaners so find a replacement filter that's easy to get and design housings etc around it, then you can change it easily in future. 

All my fan controls are manual for the moment but if I get my head around Pi Picos I may build a small environment controller for the room.

And that's it - enjoy, hope it gives you ideas to use as starting points.

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In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

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