So after printing for a while and using fans for part cooling and hotend cooling, I really wanted to try something new and see if removing fans from the carrier would actually make a difference in print quality.
For this project I had to have a way of treating the water that had been heated up and in general move said water around. So I chose to use a simple hydroponic water pump. This would turn out to do an excellent job at circulating water.
So after using a basic tuperware to hold the coolant(water) and using a pump to circulate the water and then I also incorporated a peltier unit I had on hand. This is basically a radiator for the reservoir. Then this all runs through the hot end and extruder motor.
After some testing I decided to add water wetter to the reservoir to further cool the water and keep anything from growing in there.
I will be posting more about the hotend coil and the extruder cooling block in the future and how I went about making them(both of which are made from off the shelf parts).
Now does it improve print quality? So far it seems like its not a huge difference in quality unless you’re going fairly fast. Although I would say that it’ll increase the life of the extruder motor for sure, the temperature of the extruder motor used to run quite hot. Now it’s cool to the touch, same with the heat-break on the hotend. A lot quieter too, overall a very cool upgrade/modification.
Here are a couple of shot of a certain model I printed(about 7-8 hours). Anyway I hope you guys liked this one and there will be more about it in the future!
Happy Printing!