Fabtotum Mini Back Panel

The Fabtotum has some real issues with putting the Bowden feeder's PTFE tubes in harms way, resulting in crushed tubes, increased friction and broken filament. One way of alleviating this issue is to run the printer with the back of the Fabtotum removed. This seems to allow the tubes to flex out of the way of the moving Z-Axis.

One issue with removing the back panel is that the power socket module containing the power socket and power switch are snapped and glued onto the back panel. You can remove the this module and run it this way, but I thought a cleaner approach might be to build a mini plate to hold the module in place as well as allowing slots for the existing ventilation, USB and Ethernet ports.

This is what I came up with. It is not nicely curved on the bottom as the Fabtotum's original back panel, nor is it pretty, but it works reasonably well. It probably does not matter, but I have made the ventilation holes larger and better aligned with the fan.

The OpenSCAD source is included for easy remixing if somebody wants to try and build that nice curve, or if the European model is different.

I printed this on the Fabtotum, having the fab slice it using the Draft setting.

Note this uses the bottom screw hole that the original back panel uses, but not the top one. Instead there is a screw hole in the middle that is used. This prevents the left side panel from fitting properly, so I just run without it.