Dual Fan v6 Mount for PSM by techyfiddler

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

This is a dual-piece system to hold an E3D v6 hotend on my 2014 Printrbot Simple Metal, which already has been converted to a bowden Titan extruder system with my first Thingiverse upload. It is designed to hold two 50mm radial blower fans. One of these is wired directly to 12V so that whenever the printer is on, it blows air through the heat sink, providing better airflow than the v6's stock 30mm axial fan (with much less noise and hopefully longer life). The other is wired to the controllable fan output, and its air output is directed down to cool the print.
The v6 mount could be used alone, although it is designed to work best with the dual fan shroud. For instance, the dual fan shroud holds the nuts underneath the holes in the plate so that the hotend mount can easily screw down into them. However, the dual fan mount will probably not work without this mount, because of the low tolerances for vertical misalignment and such.
To use the v6 hotend, which is considerably shorter than the stock Ubis, the bed needs to be brought closer to the hotend. Other mods have you print a spacer to hold the v6, but I think that's a pretty bad solution, sacrificing lots of ridigity and stability. This system eliminates that, but still leaves the spacing issue. I fixed this by simply lifting the heated bed up a few millimeters (in my case, by setting the 6x6 inch heated bed up on top of the non-heated "wings" instead of holding it below them). My other suggested modification is to modify the leveling probe area like I did; I filed a little metal off next to the hotend so there'd be more air space when the heatblock was positioned this way, and then I moved the nuts so that the probe is tightened into place a little differently (easily seen in the pictures).
Installing this requires a few "vitamins." Using the mount alone needs 2 M3x20mm bolts, 3 M3x12mm bolts, and 5 plain M3 nuts. Using the dual fan mount too (which must be snapped on the heat sink before using the v6 mount) requires 2 additional M3x8mm bolts (which screw directly into the mount to hold it where the stock cooling fan went) and 2 more M3x20mm bolts (which go through the bottom mounting hole of each fan and screw directly into the plastic hole).
I used these fans: https://www.amazon.com/HICTOP-Brushless-Cooling-Computer-Printer/dp/B01H1R17CY/ref=sr_1_28?srs=11465675011&ie=UTF8&qid=1476386845&sr=8-28
Disclaimer: this does not fit all Printrbot Simple Metal models. In later models, the metal of the angled fan mount area was larger, fully encircling the fan, which would not give this room to fit. You could conceivably cut off the extra flange to make it work.