Customiser: Air cage for MK8 extruder with pipe end by Bushmills

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Many fan shrouds for ventilation of the printed object exist, but none of those I looked at matched my needs: they'd not fit, feature a rigid nozzle without adjustment, block sight of nozzle and - more importantly - base layer, disallow intervention by means of a pair of tweezers or related, or are unnecessarily heavy and bulky.
In an attempt to learn from the problems with the solutions I looked at, I decided that air cage, surrounding and trapping air expelled from the cooler, and the nozzle, directing the air towards the object, should be seperate items, allowing the latter to be adjustable.
Here's now my attempt of designing the air cage, with a simple pipe end to attach a piece of flexible tube to it, which carries an air nozzle, clamped to the carrier of the extruder. A piece of wire, to bend nozzle into position, is one possible method of adjustment. I've soldered a paperclip to a crocodile clip. With the crocodile clip I attach the whole nozzle construction to the extruder. The other end of the paperclip goes to a piece of PTFE tube as nozzle, shoved into silicone hose which connects to the air cage pipe end.
This item isn't pretty - it's not really meant to be. Instead I want shape to follow function, as functional aspects bear a heavier weight to me for this application. Please consider that this implementation is still in a very early state, and improvements are not only possible, but likely too. So is it planned to replace the current flexible-tube-and-nozzle solution against a printed double hinged air duct (intended to direct air to the object from the side). As consequence are position and orientation of the opening for the pipe end likely to change to the front. Chances are also that support for a second nozzle, to point at the object from the left, will be added - but given that this should merely involve a second pipe end, or hinged nozzle attachment point, this change is likely to be a trifle. So are probably LED or camera mount points, and their respective cable guides, and given that the .scad file is provided, you can add those to the design just as easily.
Item is fully parametrised, because printers/extruders are very different, which I experienced by the difficulties finding a fitting fan shroud. Some assume that extruder carrier don't protrude from the extruder, so the cooler and fans are floating (no part of extruder below them). Others don't know how little space my extruder provides between screws and cooler, making the fit hard or impossible. And about all I looked at only provided .stl files, for which I have no decent method yet to modify, to make the design suited for my device. I'll probably stop bothering with .stl-only designs completely, and focus on those with sources provided, as a source-less design is bound to die, eventually, because lacking evolutive capabilities.
I'm not sure how much further development will be put into this design, because I currently lean towards E3D'ish designs, and consider the attempts of MK8 improvement as just an intermediate step. Replacement against a E3D bowden setup seems to me the next logical step. This design http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1632847 by Tech2C is one which I like, with cooling of extruded filament already integrated. It comes as .stl only though, and may need some extent of redoing or convincing.