I recently bought my first 3D printer. It is Anet A8 - I think one of the cheapest 3D printers in the market.
It is a great device, especialy if you are a tech guy who is not afraid of putting things together :)
I found out, that there are many additional enhancement to this printer available. I've printed some of those, they work really well, but what I found very annoying in this printer, that it is very loud.
I've changed all linear bearings and it helped a lot, but still an extruder fan was very noisy.
I've seen some articles about replacing that fan with another, more quiet 40 mm one. Unfortunatelly, those better ones fans are quite expensive. I decided I will try to replace 40 mm fan with quiet 80mm one, which in my case was cheaper and easily available.
So, in this post I will show you my solution. It is first version, many things still need improvements, please treat it as a Proof of Concept - but it works :)
The first idea was to simply make some adapter, which will allow to unscrew old fan and replace it with a new bigger (and ofcourse more quiet) one in its place for on the radiator. But meanwhile, I had some trouble with filament changing and got very annoyed that I had to unassemble the extruder totally to replace the filament. So I changed my plans, I decided to remove the radiator and use some small neodymium magnets I already had at home, to make access to the extruder much easier.
I never made any 3D project before, so at the begining, I had a lot of problems with choosing a CAD software to made a project. I tried Free CAD, but i'm my case it was very unstable. Then I switched to Sketchup, but since I'm a linux guy, I had to use it in a virtual machine, and models I made were not sliced in Cura properly. They looked good in Sketchup, but after printing, connections between elements were not solid enough and very delicate. It was probably my fault, but I had no patience for finding solution, so I moved to TinkerCad - web tool, which appeared to be simple enough to learn it in one evening and powerfull enough to make required project.
After few hours of designing, I finished with a shape like this:
Next step was to slice it and print it. Since it is a proof of concept and I didn't know if it will work at all, I decided to print it in low quality with 0.3 mm layer.
It took almost 3h to print, some supports fell off durring printing and I was affraid if the print will be fnished properly, but at the end it was quite ok:
After removing supports, adapter was ready to assemble. Unfortunatelly it turned out that the holes in 40 mm side were too small to fit my magnets. I probably didn't measure it properly, so I needed to expand them with a dremmel tool. Then I put magnets and used some super glue to keep them in place. Unfortunatelly, one corner broke, but glue helped a little and as I wrote before it's only prototype, so it's not a huge problem :)
After placing all magnets I was ready to screw new 80 mm fan:
At this point I was ready to remove old fan from the extruder, and put the replacement in its' place. In this moment I got supprised a lot... The extruder appered to be made of non magnetic metal... So magnets didn't work :)
But if I went so far, I couldn't quit, hado Id to think something out.
I unassembled the extruder and noticed that there are unused holes I can use to screw some metal part to it.
I found some metal part at workshop which might be usefull :)
After shortening it a little, it fit quite well. So there was a solution for upper part. For lower part I prepared small metal badge with holes, and screw it all together with the extruder.
So the final solution looks like this:
It doesn't look proffesional, but works well as a temporary solution. I'll have to think something more elegant in the future. Now I was able to connect a fan with magnets:
I was a little affraid if the adapter will not be catching z-axis rodes, but fortunatelly it fits (with no margin left, but still :) ). The only thing left to do was to make an electric connection. I cut off old fan, soldered new wires with pins, and made a connection to original fan plug.
And here you have additional photos of final result:
And my conclusions....
The look is... strange :) Fan is huge comparing to extruder size, but it is VERY QUIET. So the goal of thetproject is definitely achieved. I will probably leave it as is, maybe I'll print an adapter one more time with better quality, and I'll have to find some more elegant way to connect magnets to extruder. The solution I made doesn't look pretty, but I love the possibility to replace filament easily.
The 3D project itself still needs some improvements, its' connections aren't smooth enough, magnet holes are to small, but as you can see it is usable. I put it on thingverse, so feel free to download an stl, and try it yourself :)
Here is the link
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2812136
Feel free to comment, but remember it is only a prototype and it works for me :)
It is a great device, especialy if you are a tech guy who is not afraid of putting things together :)
I found out, that there are many additional enhancement to this printer available. I've printed some of those, they work really well, but what I found very annoying in this printer, that it is very loud.
I've changed all linear bearings and it helped a lot, but still an extruder fan was very noisy.
I've seen some articles about replacing that fan with another, more quiet 40 mm one. Unfortunatelly, those better ones fans are quite expensive. I decided I will try to replace 40 mm fan with quiet 80mm one, which in my case was cheaper and easily available.
So, in this post I will show you my solution. It is first version, many things still need improvements, please treat it as a Proof of Concept - but it works :)
The first idea was to simply make some adapter, which will allow to unscrew old fan and replace it with a new bigger (and ofcourse more quiet) one in its place for on the radiator. But meanwhile, I had some trouble with filament changing and got very annoyed that I had to unassemble the extruder totally to replace the filament. So I changed my plans, I decided to remove the radiator and use some small neodymium magnets I already had at home, to make access to the extruder much easier.
I never made any 3D project before, so at the begining, I had a lot of problems with choosing a CAD software to made a project. I tried Free CAD, but i'm my case it was very unstable. Then I switched to Sketchup, but since I'm a linux guy, I had to use it in a virtual machine, and models I made were not sliced in Cura properly. They looked good in Sketchup, but after printing, connections between elements were not solid enough and very delicate. It was probably my fault, but I had no patience for finding solution, so I moved to TinkerCad - web tool, which appeared to be simple enough to learn it in one evening and powerfull enough to make required project.
After few hours of designing, I finished with a shape like this:
Next step was to slice it and print it. Since it is a proof of concept and I didn't know if it will work at all, I decided to print it in low quality with 0.3 mm layer.
It took almost 3h to print, some supports fell off durring printing and I was affraid if the print will be fnished properly, but at the end it was quite ok:
After removing supports, adapter was ready to assemble. Unfortunatelly it turned out that the holes in 40 mm side were too small to fit my magnets. I probably didn't measure it properly, so I needed to expand them with a dremmel tool. Then I put magnets and used some super glue to keep them in place. Unfortunatelly, one corner broke, but glue helped a little and as I wrote before it's only prototype, so it's not a huge problem :)
After placing all magnets I was ready to screw new 80 mm fan:
At this point I was ready to remove old fan from the extruder, and put the replacement in its' place. In this moment I got supprised a lot... The extruder appered to be made of non magnetic metal... So magnets didn't work :)
But if I went so far, I couldn't quit, hado Id to think something out.
I unassembled the extruder and noticed that there are unused holes I can use to screw some metal part to it.
After shortening it a little, it fit quite well. So there was a solution for upper part. For lower part I prepared small metal badge with holes, and screw it all together with the extruder.
So the final solution looks like this:
It doesn't look proffesional, but works well as a temporary solution. I'll have to think something more elegant in the future. Now I was able to connect a fan with magnets:
I was a little affraid if the adapter will not be catching z-axis rodes, but fortunatelly it fits (with no margin left, but still :) ). The only thing left to do was to make an electric connection. I cut off old fan, soldered new wires with pins, and made a connection to original fan plug.
And here you have additional photos of final result:
And my conclusions....
The look is... strange :) Fan is huge comparing to extruder size, but it is VERY QUIET. So the goal of thetproject is definitely achieved. I will probably leave it as is, maybe I'll print an adapter one more time with better quality, and I'll have to find some more elegant way to connect magnets to extruder. The solution I made doesn't look pretty, but I love the possibility to replace filament easily.
The 3D project itself still needs some improvements, its' connections aren't smooth enough, magnet holes are to small, but as you can see it is usable. I put it on thingverse, so feel free to download an stl, and try it yourself :)
Here is the link
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2812136
Feel free to comment, but remember it is only a prototype and it works for me :)
This is just what i was looking for. Thankyou Sir!!
ReplyDeletehmmm mine hits the threaded rod on the left while homing...
ReplyDeleteDo You use magnets? In my case the gap is minimal, but it fits when I move it a little bit higer on magnets
Delete