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Has anyone used one of these aluminium cubes?

Aluminium cube

It is used to mount the fan for the hotend, when used on a delta effector, like so:

Aluminium cube and hotend

Are they a good idea?

Without actually buying one and trying it, compared to the traditional fan mount, I imagine the pros are

  • Additional heatsink surface area

and that is it, I could think of only one tenuous advantage...

However, I would imagine that the cons are:

  • Additional weight on the effector1, for the push rods to move around, i.e. slightly higher inertia;
  • Probably restricted air flow, and;
  • Unnecessary additional cost

Therefore, as the cons appears to outweigh the pros, are they worth upgrading to from, say, a typical plastic fan mount:

Plastic fan mount

Does anyone have first hand experience? Are there any other additional benefits, and/or is heat dissipation that much better?

1 Of course, the lightest solution is with the fan mounted, such that it hangs off the top of the effector, but with no air flow guide and hence less effective heat dissipation.

Greenonline
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1 Answers1

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I think its only advantage is that it serves to move money from the folks who buy it to the folks that sell it, and that's an advantage purely for the folks that sell it.

"Additional heatsink surface area" is quite doubtful - it would have poor coupling to the actual heatsink. If the actual heatsink is correctly designed, there's no need for additional area, anyway. This design clearly does limit airflow to the top and bottom fins - the bottom one, in particular, is not a good place to limit airflow for best function, and yet it's severely occluded by the design of this block.

Save your money.

Edit - I think the plastic one shown is also less than ideal - the close coupling to the edges of the heatsink reduces the effectiveness of the heatsink, which would otherwise be dumping heat into the airflow past those edges. A better design (IMHO, gut engineering) would be spaced off the ends/edges of the fins about as much as the space between fins, not touching them. Axial fans perform poorly with backpressure, and that would also reduce backpressure.

Ecnerwal
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