Replicator 2 Revised Fan Mount Assembly

thingiverse

I've got a small fleet of 7 Rep2's and I have a few gripes regarding the current cooling fan mount, which this design addresses: The overhang gets in the way when, due to major clogs/gripping filament stuck inside the extruder, I must get under the extruder motor to trim material away from it. - The overhang here is easily removeable, but securly attached. The mounting screws that attach the mount to the aluminum block are all but inaccessible inside the cable cavity. If the mount ever needs to be removed, it takes nearly ten minutes of making 1/8 turns repeatedly with the allen wrench to get the two screws off and takes just as much time to get them on. - Two holes in the top of part 2 of this assembly make it easy to get allen wrenches with a clear axis of rotation down to the screws. The entire mount easily bends when the block is warm and is almost impossible to get back into the correct shape thanks to those two mounting screws being attached via a less than 1mm plastic plate to the rest of the assembly. - The new attachment plate has been thickened slightly and also axially reinforced. It's proven very difficult to bend, even when the block is above typical extrusion temps. The cable cavity is aggravatingly small in an attempt to provide as much space as possible for the head to move along the X-axis. Unfortunately, MBI overshot this limitation by about 5mm at the cost of easy head reassembly. - I expanded the depth of the cable cavity by about 2mm, still maintaining a wide berth for the head to move to the -X extreme. Things now fit much more easily, and accessing/reassembling the driveblock and extruder has become much faster. The heating element cable has no direct access to the head via the cable cavity, requiring it to uselessly loop through the cable cavity and take up even more space than necessary. - A chase for the cable runs from the cavity down to the head itself, making for tidy cable management and opening up more space in the cavity. Instructions Used http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:64669 as a basic template, then cleaned up some of the dimensions. Got the idea for a cable chase from this design, though the top holes for accessing the mounting screws was a matter of co-evolution. Thanks bluejay117!