Lulzbot TAZ 5 80mm Fan Mount

thingiverse

I needed to create a way to provide a serious amount of cooling for my TAZ 5 / Hexagon hotend. The little "squirrel cage" fan was just.... cute. No offense to the Taz designers! I LOVE my machine :) But seriously, that small fan was way too small, and it was actually really noisy. So, as all good do-it-yourselfers would do, I designed and printed my own along with a Filament Tube Retainer. The Filament Tube Retainer is a modified version of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:766614 created by Wolfie, and the fan shroud is my original design. The intent of the shroud is to provide as much air flow across the cooling fins right above the heater block in the hotend itself, while preventing any airflow across the heater block. I also wanted to provide some additional air flow across the entire filament feed assembly, but I wanted it to look and feel as if it were a stock item. The shroud itself went great, but I realized that I wanted to keep the filament tube retainer that I had (Wolfie's design), plus I needed a way to anchor the top of fan shroud. Slight design change = win. Instructions The mounting points of the fan shroud are 3 existing points on the extruder assembly. The stock "squirrel cage" fan will need to be removed completely, and is no longer needed. The first one is the small unused threaded hole just above where the "squirrel cage" fan was. The second uses the stock bolt the holds the hotend base left side. And the third attaches to the filament tube retainer. I printed mine using Cura with the "PLA_cura_fine" profile from Lulzbot slightly modified. I've included the profile as well. This is a CURA only profile. For more specific details, please refer to my complete posting on the Lulzbot forums at https://forum.lulzbot.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2054 I used a standard 80mm cooling fan from an old computer I had. I also used the power supply from the same computer to run the fan. I did this because I wasn't comfortable with pulling a strong 12 volt source from the main board of my TAZ 5. For now I have a manual on/off switch for the fan.