QIDI rear mounted dual blower for active print cooling by whited3

Last crawled date: 2 years, 12 months ago

FIRST THING FIRST: this needs a 5mm shim on the Y-axis in order to allow clearance for the blowers and assembly behind the print head. This is critical because when both the build plate is raised all the way up, and the Y-axis is all the way to the rear of the printer, there is no clearance between this blower and Z-axis bearings as the X-axis jogs past.
The Z-axis bearings are wider than the Z-axis rods, so once the Z-axis bearings are lower than the blower assembly, there are no more clearance issues. You can do without the shim if you modify your start script and build plan accordingly, but I personally strongly recommend the shim.
Ok now that that's over with:
This accomplishes 3 things I really wanted.
First, both print heads have cooling so I do not have to keep switching spools based on cooling needs.
Second, each print head has its own blower. I found that simply using the stock blower to cool both heads at once was giving me sub-par cooling and warping issues.
Third, REAR MOUNTED. To me, this is way better than blocking the view of the print via a front mounted assembly.
Bonus stuff - I opted to use blowers rather than fans because these printers simply do not have the space to smoothly transition from the large diameter of a fan down to the small diameter cooling ducts. All the cooling assemblies I see that use fans sharply transition to a small set of ducts directly in front of the fan, reducing the capability of the fans. Blowers, due to their design, higher static pressure, smaller exit, are better suited to this application of forcing air into these smaller cooling assemblies. That's my take on the situation and I do not have test data to back this up - so take it with a grain of salt.
I purchased blowers here :http://www.ebay.com/itm/262351228368?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
They are the same manufacturer and dimensions as the stock QIDI blower. They have slightly higher current draw and probably higher CFM.
Also, googling this will put you in the right direction: 24v 5015s blower
The main criteria are
50x50x15mm - some are wider than 15mm so be careful
24v
I chose .14 amp blowers while the stock was .11 or .12 from memory.
Blowers are simply wired in parallel; plugged into the original QIDI harness.
Another note - the two blowers are isolated from each other, so i suppose you could use this with only one blower while waiting for another in the mail, or if you simply want a rear mounted blower.
Mounting: tabs interface with the top of the X-axis carriage, but allow translation left & right (along the X-axis). I left it this way as this is my beta product if you will, and in case there were clearance issues. There aren't, and I simply affixed a small piece of double stick foam tape to the same surface as the tabs. This snugs everything up nicely and I didn't even remove the backing to expose the adhesive to the print head carriage.