Heated Build Plate (also called the "bed"):
The heated bed is a large, 12-inch-diameter PCB, with one giant electrical trace arranged in a spiral. I haven't measured it myself, but it's supposed to have approximately 1 ohm of resistance. The wires that were in the kit for the power supply are only 18-gauge, carrying around 10 amps of current. I should have tossed the 18-gauge wires in my supply drawer and just used 14-gauge wire from the start, but that's going to have to be a future upgrade. EDIT: I upgraded to 14-gauge wires. I don't think the terminals on the control board could have taken anything larger, but 14 fit fine. Unfortunately, no noticeable performance improvement on bed heat-up times.
There is also a thermistor and an LED - the bed temperature is controlled by a Pulse-Width modulated power supply, and the LED flickers right along with the pulses to let you know if the heated bed is on or not.
Extruder Hot End:
Once the RTV silicone set up, I crimped the electrical connections and insulated all the conductive parts with Kapton Tape:
I ran the wires for the effector platform according to the directions:
And then make the connections to the hot end:
I had to disassemble the hot end and feed the parts up through the effector platform to get the proper result:
(Actually, at this point I still had the effector platform upside down. But I would not discover that until later, when I tried to install the cooling fans.)
Here's what it looks like with the thermal elements installed:
The heated bed is a large, 12-inch-diameter PCB, with one giant electrical trace arranged in a spiral. I haven't measured it myself, but it's supposed to have approximately 1 ohm of resistance. The wires that were in the kit for the power supply are only 18-gauge, carrying around 10 amps of current. I should have tossed the 18-gauge wires in my supply drawer and just used 14-gauge wire from the start, but that's going to have to be a future upgrade. EDIT: I upgraded to 14-gauge wires. I don't think the terminals on the control board could have taken anything larger, but 14 fit fine. Unfortunately, no noticeable performance improvement on bed heat-up times.
There is also a thermistor and an LED - the bed temperature is controlled by a Pulse-Width modulated power supply, and the LED flickers right along with the pulses to let you know if the heated bed is on or not.
Extruder Hot End:
Once the RTV silicone set up, I crimped the electrical connections and insulated all the conductive parts with Kapton Tape:
I ran the wires for the effector platform according to the directions:
And then make the connections to the hot end:
...which turned out to be a mistake. The hot end is supposed to sit on top of the effector platform, with just the nozzle poking through to the bottom of the effector platform. Instead, I had this:
(Actually, at this point I still had the effector platform upside down. But I would not discover that until later, when I tried to install the cooling fans.)
Here's what it looks like with the thermal elements installed:
