Igor Kromin |   Consultant. Coder. Blogger. Tinkerer. Gamer.

This post follows on from Part 1 where I showed how I've built the box for the 3D printer. In this post I show how I added an exhaust vent to the box.

This is the final result with the exhaust attached and a few other modifications to the box which I will describe in other posts.
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It looks so much better now than the original and provides a better environment for the printer as well as me since there are no more fumes filling up my room.

It took a fair amount of time to get it to this stage primarily because I had to pull the whole box apart one edge a time so I could remove the left over masking tape and more importantly to wrap the aluminium in carbon fibre vinyl. More on this in future posts however.


This post is not in a chronological order exactly since I was working on several changes to the box at the same time. Some of these changes I will describe later.

I've contacted RomScraj about pluggin in an extra fan into the Portabee and they told me that a standard 12v fan is going to work. There is a pin header on the Gen6 board to power it. Unfortunately this header is always on, which is a little annoying I thought as it would have been nice to control the fan to run during print jobs only.

Anyway, this is a fan I started with simply because I had it lying around, it's a CoolerMaster 12025 12cm Blue LED PWM Fan (2000RPM 70CFM). The PWM feature of course would not work, so I used a 2pin PCB header on the +/- wires to make a connector to use later.
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Then I used a two wire cable with DuPont connectors on either end to connect the printer to the Gen6 board, it started to spin!
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Trial mounting this in the case (I cut the hole for the fan earlier).
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At this point I had to take the top of the case out to fit some things properly. I added a fan grille during this time.
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Looks pretty cool at night :)
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Next I printed an exhaust vent to connect the exhaust piping to and hooked it all up.
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Later I printed the other end of the exhaust so that it would fit into the gap in my window.
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The last thing with the exhaust was to bolt it together properly. I wanted to be able to remove the exhaust vent without pulling the fan out, so I used longer bolts to attach the fan from the inside-out like this:
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Then the exhaust hood bolts on top:
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I didn't want the bolts to be exposed like that because they could hurt someone, so I printed some covers for them:
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Part 3 is here.

-i

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