This is the headbed after 1 year and 8 months (its an April 2016 model). I figured that all the black smoke was not a good sign so I stopped the printer and found this. FlashForge will not offer any explanation as it is out of warrantly. I am loathe to purchase a replacement cable and connector from an unrepentant Flashforge since the next one may catch fire. Does anyone know of a connector that can handle 10 amps or so near 110C temperature and vibration? I am considering soldering the wires directly to the board.
austweb
2
I soldered straight to the board when my machine fried the plug, I’ve not had trouble ever since.
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Ditto, soldered the wires to the PCB here too.
I also replaced the cheap PVC jacketed wires with some super flexible silicone jacketed wire.
I replaced mine with DigiKey: ED1609-ND. It’s a screw-terminal block rated for 15 Amps and will fit on the same footprint on the circuit board. Unsoldering the old connector and soldering in the new one is fairly straightforward as long as the overheating of the old connector didn’t delaminate the traces. I used this instead of soldering my wires directly to my board in case I wanted to remove the heater board – it’s a lot easier to do if you can remove the wires.
The original connector that FlashForge used (which is DigiKey parts A112698-ND and A112692-ND) is only rated for 7.5 Amps at ROOM temperature, and just barely at that. The problem is that the contacts move and don’t make solid connection, then they start heating, which corrodes it, which increases the resistance, causing it to heat even more, and eventually you have a meltdown.
Oh, and I also replaced the original small gauge wire with a high quality 16 gauge wire with silicone insulation (instead of PVC). And, I shortened the length by about 10 inches (or 250mm) to get rid of some excess wire they had coiled up (they just used a 1 meter cable and coiled up the excess – it really only needs to be about 750mm overall length). And, I tied the positive lead directly to the 24V power supply rather than connecting it to the main board. No sense in running all of the current down both sets of traces on the PCB. Only the negative lead is switched with the MOSFET transistor, so you only need to connect the negative side to the main board. The positive one, you can put a fork-terminal on the wire and connect it directly to the power supply…
