Transcript:
In a previous video I showed how I was getting really good prints with my Cura profile with the filament fan turned off. But on a Creality Ender 3, turning that fan off actually turns off the electronics fan which is not good. So I’ll show you a quick fix on how to get around that and then we’ll try out the Hero Me cooling duct and see how that does on today’s Filament Friday. This week’s Filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon supporters. My original video was released about three or four weeks ago. The whole point was get your profile right and then add a fan. Don’t rely on a fan to get your prints right. And this brought up an issue with Creality. Turns out when you turn the fan off for cooling which has the yellow and blue wires here, it also shuts off the cooling fan for the electronics. So your electronics sit there and cook without any air blowing on it. The red and black wires from this fan are right near the blue and yellow wires for the filament cooling fan and they’re connected on the circuit board. So this is unacceptable so what I’m going to do is pull off this connector and then what I want to do is add an extension like this I found this on Amazon. I bought a pack of 25 so it comes with both sides but all I need is the one side to fix this and then it plugs right into the fan connector. And then I can take the other end and connect that direct to power. And I’m going to use the same power pins that control the cooling of the hot end. So when the hot end is being cooled so are the electronics. The only problem I have with this connector is it’s got red and black opposite to Creality’s red and black. You could just easily connect the black the power and the red to ground but instead what I did is push the locks out on these two pins and reverse the polarity on the fan. Here’s the final assembly. I’ve got power connected and then it goes through the connector right to the fan and the wires themselves came tinned at the end which you don’t want when you’re using a terminal block. You want loose wires so it kind of crushes and holds. You don’t want solder in there so what I did is cut the ends off and then stripped them. Now it still looks like the wire is tinned but there are individual strands so it can crush and actually hold properly. Now some people put ferrules on the end of these things which is probably even a better idea. I don’t have any handy so I’m just gonna put these in the block. Just screw in place and then what I also did was add a tie strap here so the stress relief is there not back towards the terminal block is. So that way there’s less chance of it breaking. So now I can just put the wire inside and put the cover back on and screw it in place. And then we’ll test this guy out. So when I put power on, both the hot end fan and the electronics fan come on together. Now this is gonna be a little bit louder because it’s always gonna be running but to me it’s worth it to make sure the electronics are cool. After I release my video about not using a fan I had a lot of people comment that I was wrong. That the fan cooling the hot end was actually blowing down and that’s why my prints were coming out so good. It wasn’t my profile. In fact my good friend Chris Riley at Chris’s basement, a great YouTube channel, I highly recommend you go check him out. Rather than just tell me I’m wrong he went and tested in himself. So Chris represented me well. He gave me a good review but he really had questions about that fan as well. If it was blowing down. So he took some metal tape and blocked that area and this is what he got. “This is no fan this is fan you can see just how rough the front of that is”. The only issue I had with Chris’s test and I explained it to him and he understood, is he didn’t use my profile. My Cura profile. He used his own slic3r profile. So I’m gonna try it again using his method of tape in the bottom and use my profile and see what results I get. Here’s my solution. It’s duct taped, heavy duty duct tape wrapped all the way to the boot around the nozzle. And here’s my results. Fan versus no fan and blocked shroud. I don’t see a major difference between these two. Several people told me I should try the Hero Me fan duct, that I found on Thingiverse, and they said that’ll give you a really good results. So I did. I downloaded that. Loaded it into Cura, all the pieces. I’m gonna use the stock fan still but I’m gonna use this set up and I printed it in PETG. Now it shows PLA at the top but really, I changed the settings. There all the same settings with 0.2 layer height, 25% infill but 240 degrees. I’m using the Prusa PETG I used in a previous video. 50 millimeters per second and I did use supports with a top and bottom layer. Once I sliced it, it would said it would take 5 hours 46 minutes and this is what it looks like. This actually printed out beautifully. The supports broke away perfectly. This was actually a really nice design. It fit together nicely and so I installed it on my machine and here it is. And I didn’t put a cover on a fan so it’s a bit exposed but I am using a stock fan and it slid right in place. The screws all fit. I was pretty happy with it. The only thing I didn’t like is the ducts seem to be blowing right on the nozzle. But I gave it a shot anyway and when I printed again I don’t see a major improvement. There might be a slight improvement at certain points in the print but I’m not seeing a major difference from print to print. So here’s the Hero me versus the no fan black shroud. There’s definitely a slight improvement in them in the base of it but Hero Me versus the OEM fan shroud. No difference. I blocked the shroud so no air was blowing and I even tried a better cooling duct system and I still don’t see a major improvement over using my profile with no fan. So I still say getting the profile right is more