Prusa Enclosure Maintenance Dial

Hey team,

I've put together a simple dial which can be attached to the Prusa Enclosure to help track elapsed print time between maintenance intervals. Although this information can be extracted from the printer itself, having something visual for me is a useful reminder, similar to a sicker in your car letting you know when the next oil change is due.

In the case of the MK4, the Hand Book suggests performing a general clean every 200 hours of printing. The design of this dial is similar to something you might see in a vehicle tachometer; the longer lines indicate ‘10’ hours, and the shorter are increments of ‘5’ hours, in total making ‘200 hours’ on the dial.

At print time you can rotate the dial by the number of ‘hours’ presented to approximate when you're getting close to the magical 200 mark and then simply reset back to zero after cleaning :-)

The pint itself is comprised of four parts;

1. The mount which attaches to the enclosure
2. The upper dial surface (with cutout sections for time increments)
3. The lower dial surface (with raised increments)
4. The pointer

I've tried to use a mixture of bottom layer fill patterns to make it look a bit more interesting, and given it's comprised of four parts, you can print the upper and lower dial surfaces in different colours to give some contrast so it's easy to read the points on the dial. In my case I'm going with the classic black and orange colour scheme :-)

With regards to the printing settings, I've kept this one simple, Gyroid pattern throughout, 15% infill across the board and PETG. On the upper dial surface I went with Hilbert Curve on the bottom layer so that when it's facing you, it has a nice texture to it, and on the pointer I went with Octagram Spiral. On the Lower dial surface I enabled ironing for the upper most surface so that the ‘increments' of the dial had a smooth surface to contrast with the Hilbert Curve. In reality however the increments are quite thin so the ironing didn't make much difference, but the colour contrast is quite nice.

With regards to the printing, please position the parts so that the large flat sides face the bed so you don't need to apply any support material. I've built into the model an overall 0.2 mm tolerance between all mating surfaces so a wide range of filaments should fit without too much trouble. In my case with the PETG, I found the upper and lower dial surfaces fit nicely without any need for glue, a good snap fit, however the pointer and base were a little loose. In order for the pointer to have a better friction fit, I used Pursa Slicer (2.6 at time of writing), to scale the pivot point to 3.2 mm which resulted in a better fit (it should stay still until you are ready to move it).

With regards to mounting hardware I used an ‘M3n’ nut and 'M3x8' bolt which came as spare parts with the Prusa Enclosure.

Enjoy ! :-)