Search This Blog

Sunday, October 28, 2018

$31 Filament Dryer? Heck yes

This is a post I made on the /r/3Dprinting subreddit a few months ago.

I started seeing the signs of moist PLA filament a few weeks after opening a spool, so I bought this food dehydrator on eBay: item: 182608105385. It comes with shelves that just rotate to lock/unlock, so they're super easy to remove, making it perfect for a filament dryer. It will hold two normal width 1kg filament spools, or one wide spool + one normal spool (total internal height ~15cm).



The best part? Take a close look at the PrintDry Dryer and compare it to the picture I posted and in the eBay description. They use the same dryer base! The only difference are the filament tray/cylinder things and the "printdry" decal, and this being 1/3-1/4 the cost.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to realize this, but I thought I'd share. I've seen food dehydrator conversions, but they usually require some modifications like cutting out shelves or printing custom cylinders to hold the filament spools. This just worked out of the box.

Update January 2020: I found an almost identical one in the US on eBay, Rosewill brand, for a tad under $40 shipped. The base is identical except it as F and C units, and it runs on 110V instead of 220V like the UK one. The lid is the same. However, the shelves are molded into the rings on this one, which means I can't take them out easily. I may laser them out if I can get the laser head high enough. I could also try to cut them out. Anyways, I just replaced the old base with the new one for now. I took the old one apart. It's very basic. It has an AC motor that drives an impeller fan, which blows air up through a central core that contains a wire heating element similar to a blow dryers. The wire heating element's power is routed through a weird multi-plate resistor looking thing that's attached to the temperature knob...not really sure how that works. 


No comments:

Post a Comment