Cooling Fan for Flashforge Creator X by gwimaker

Last crawled date: 4 years, 1 month ago

I printed AndyGadget's excellent designhttps://www.thingiverse.com/thing:652185
It looked like a good fit for my FlashForge Creator X with metal frame. This is the same printer as the FlashForge Creator Pro but without the plastic cover.
After installing, the 5015 fan case was sitting about 3mm too high on my FlashForge Creator X - with the result that the fan would definitely crash into the printer metal frame before hitting the Y-axis limit switch located at the top right rear of the printer. So I had to make some necessary modifications to the original design.
I had already printed the original AndyGadget design but after discovering the conflict with the printer metal frame, I modified and re-printed the plate portion then actually modified the duct part (physically) with a pair of side cutters.
I took AndyGadget's two STL files and cut them using Slic3r by 3.6 mm or so. After modifying the duct STL file I never did reprint that part, so hopefully I got the virtual fit about right. So if you find it too long just sand it down a bit and if too short there may be a tiny gap but pretty much all of the air will go into the duct anyway. You can see in the photo the result.
After mounting the parts, I discovered yet another conflict. Two of the four top attachment screws for the Z-axis were too long. Luckily I had two 7 mm long screws in the plastic bag of bits that were provided by the manufacturer so I replaced the two 11 mm screws with the 7 mm ones using a 5.5 mm nut driver, no need for any hex wrench on top for the screw head.
I had mounted a 12v LED strip on the head carrier (super illumination now) so I just tapped into that 12v bus for the 12v fan using a polarized JST RCY connector pair with 2.5 mm pin spacing as a quick connect. Since the printer power supply is 24v only, I added a 7812 12v linear regulator alongside the power supply for the LEDs.