PWM Fan Mount

This is thing 504069 on thingiverse.

I spent a lot of time trying to build a mount that would put the fan off to the side and finally gave up on it. This mount is much simpler and puts the fan on the front. I had to rework my foamboard front case cover to make room for the fan to stick out, but it all seems to work well now. Here's the top view:

And the bottom view of the business end. I made the shroud a 3/4 circle so I could still see the hot end if I peek under the fan:

And the new modified door with the extension for the fan to stick out:

It all seems to work. I can certainly feel air blowing out the bottom when I manually run the fan.

The completed object is composed of three separate parts which are assembled like so:

The bottom part in the above image comes from the anchor_plus_shroud module. The notch in the shroud is to make room for a bolt that sticks out on the bottom of my carriage. The top is designed to fit over the wooden plate on the carriage and the thin washers line up with some 4-40 bolts that stick out the front of the carriage. I can use 4-40 nuts to hold the part on fairly solidly.

The middle part slides over the bottom part (with a little filing and sanding, anyway :-) and the ducts line up with the open end of the shroud. This is from the duct_and_plate module. A little acetone joins the parts permanently and seals the ducts to the shroud.

Finally the top part comes from the fancone module. It provides some clips to slip a 40mm fan under (at least the Noctua fan I used fits well) and a cone to widen the 40mm fan to fit the slightly larger separation of the ducts. I got it positioned using a rubber band to hold it in place, then dabbed some acetone to bond it permanently.

I used the extension cable that came with the Noctua fan and a zip tie to connect it at a single point to the existing cable bundle (to keep it out of the way of the filament), then just ran the extension through the center hole in the back of the solidoodle:

The end of the cable goes on the fan header I added while working on getting a new bed heater installed. I had to scavenge a two pin connector to use to get the unused yellow wire out of the way because there isn't enough room for the normal three pin connector.

My hope is this improvement together with the stabilizer will make it possible to print tall parts with overhangs and no longer knock them off the print bed when a layer curls up a bit. Time will tell if it works...

Update: I was able to print some very tall parts for a Sonic Screwdriver after adding this and the X-Axis Stabilizer, so it definitely seems to have helped.

...Meanwhile, I've upgraded the carriage and extruder and this fan doesn't work, but fortunately the Solidoodle mk5 Extruder Fan Shroud already exists on thingiverse, and I printed up one of them to use till I swap in the E3D and need yet another different design.

Go back to my main Solidoodle page.