Printrbot Simple Metal - Bed upgrade

I don't know how it took me this long to get with the program...

Of all of the modifications I've made to my printer, I'd say Kapton is the best modification / addition so far.

So far I've measured just over 11A when both the Heated bed and the Hotend are both active.

MAKE SURE YOU ARE AT EXACTLY 12V, i had my Power Supply set at 12.1V and continuously had random disconnects when heating or cooling the heated bed, must have been over voltage protection doing its job :)

I've also added {M140 S0 ;} to the end G code section under "Printer Settings" in Slic3r.

this disables the heated bed after the print finishes.

**UPDATE: I think I've found the answer, http://help.printrbot.com/Answers/View/5242/Brown+out+reset:+Printrboard+or+PSU

Bill had a similar problem "Bad heated bed. The bed was sporadically pulling enough current to trip the PSU short-circuit protection. I replaced it with a RepRap MK2B heatbed dual power from Amazon and after 20+ hours of trouble-free printing it is clear that that was the problem."

It may be that the fancy Kapton Nichrome heater is causing a similar problem on my board.

At the moment the reset problem seems to be contained to the heat up process and just after a print. luckily whenever I get the print stared it runs through and only resets and hangs up after finishing so I'm OK with it for now until I find a solution, It also works much better since I added the indicator LED.

I found a 3.5mm sheet of cork at the hardware store, and after installation my entire setup works more efficiently.

The printbed doesn't lose heat as quickly as before when it was touching the printbed frame, much less heat loss due to conduction. I've also taped up the bottom of the bed to insulate it further.

The heated bed installation turned out to be more complicated, had huge overheating issues with the wiring and the Power supply.

Rright after installation I had to add additional wiring to hadle the current as well as add a fan onto the Power supply and heatsinks to the MOSFET's on the Printrboard (rev D). I think that the MOSFET for the heated bed was overheating and may be what was causing the intermittent resets during prints since installation yesterday.

After fixing all of that it seems to be printing just fine.

Great! my heated bed arrived today, I ordered one of the flexible PCB heaters that just peels and sticks onto your printbed. I've mounted it right above (±13mm) printed parts so I'll only be using it at lower temperatures, 40°C~60°C

Ensure nice straight parts by sticking it down instead of using glue or hairspray

This picture shows a decent gash in the new polished BMS round bars, and that after just one week's worth of intense printing. I'll replace these with hardened chrome coated rods a.s.a.p

Final bed print area is 270mm × 205mm × 140mm

There's a slight rattle on the X-axis that i want to sort out, it causes some minor printing artifacts whenever X-axis changes direction fast, but nothing serious. I will have to make a new part.

So far so good, I managed to figure out how to manually set the X and Y Print area parameters.

Use the M208 (or in my case M211 X 260 Y205) and then set the desired values, hit M500 to save.

Important!

You'll notice that right underneath the hotend, the new printbed seems to sit right up against the screw head that holds the X-axis motor to the frame. I didn't notice until after Itook the paint off of my printbed frame...

anyways, it is because i had planned my bending line of the material at 1/3rd the thickness of the material (used for steel) turns out Aluminium bends a little different. I temporarily fixed the problem by replacing the hex screws with smaller phillips screws.