External fan to cool bed after a print
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Anyone ever hooked up an external fan to cool your bed after a print. Please share your designs....
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I just use the part cooler to help cool it down after the print. It raises after the print, turns that fan to 100 and lingers for 5 minutes before moving away. That's usually enough to be able to cool the print and bed sufficiently that I can remove the part by hand or with a scrapper.
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I use a glass bed so I can pull the bed after a print and use my 8x8 aluminum plate that is 10mm thick to act as a heat sink and suck the heat right out of the plate. After setting the glass bed on the plate, it only takes a minute or two before you hear the print pop free.
The glass is borosilicate and I generally don't run the bed any hotter than 50 - 60c, so I've never had the glass bed shatter or break. YMMV, but this has been a great way to pop off prints for me.
Additionally, the plate is a nice work surface on my table when not sucking up heat.
Got it off of Aliexpress for $20 I think.
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@phaedrux I like that idea but I do a lot of tall prints (200mm) so I'm not sure if my cooling fan would help for those parts.
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@totalitarian The air movement is enough to help the temps drop a little quicker. If you wanted to reach room temp you could set the bed temp to a little over room temp in slicer your end gcode and use M116 to wait until the temp is reached.
But I'm guessing you're wondering if you could use a seperate fan to cool just the bed. If you have open PWM fan headers you could connect a fan there and control it by gcode.
If you don't have any spare controllable fan headers maybe you could free one up by moving the hotend cooler to an always on header.
There's also the option of a USB fan, if you happen to have free usb ports nearby.
Something like this: https://www.banggood.com/Wholesale-Mini-Flexible-USB-Cooling-Cooler-Fan-for-PC-Laptop-Notebook-Tablet-Pocket-Travel-p-47720.html
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@totalitarian What kind of printer do you have? I think an endstop switch located on the opposite end of your homing area could activate a relay to turn on a fan. Add a move to hit the endstop in your end script. Should work for everything but a delta.
