Topic: Crazy Idea - Foam bed insulator?
I seem to get a new crazy idea every day since getting my Solidoodle, but I think this one might have a little more merit than some of the others.
One of the things I find most frustrating is waiting for the print bed to come up to temperature when starting a print. Today, in frustration, I ended up putting a block of styrofoam on the bed while it warmed, and I guesstimate that this speeded up the process at least 4x. The foam didn't stick to the kapton, so I'm tempted to do this every time.
It occurred to me I could automate this process by having the start code wait for the bed to come up to temperature, then have it push the foam off the bed prior to printing.
Of course, the foam might melt if it touched the extruder head unless some kind of guard were added around it, or the foam might rotate and jam against the printer frame. So the second idea was to attach the block to the top front bar of the frame with a spring loaded hinge, and have the start gcode lower the bed to allow the foam to swing free.
Is this crazy? Anybody do something similar? What is the melting point of styrofoam anyway?
