3D Printers, Makers, DIY hacks, solutions and post printing tools

Created by Emil Pop on 13 April, 2018

Nice one, but nope, water is not pulled into a filament that I am printing with as Ice Print.


Actually I use it to cool down my heatsink, works miracles, trust me, especially at high temperatures printing in very long sessions, which previously were impossible.


I just finished a 72 hours long print with my makeshift block, went through well, I tried the same print about 5 different times with air cooled heat sinks of various types (chimera, volcano, etc) and growing the fan size from 30mm to 40, to 50, to...80 mm diameter, with funnles to enhance cooling, always ruined the print sooner or latter, but the bigger the air flow, the latter it happened; filament jammed, no matter how much air I managed to pump in to wash away the heat.


I also considered to try Peltier cell for cooling.


Yerp, useless; the heat transfer is rather fit for refrigeration where slow coling over long time gives desired results, reason for which they do not use them in car motor cooling either, where we need high rate of cooling over short amounts of time, constantly, that is rather "instant constant cooling" need we have.


Hence I took an aluminium block and made myself the water cooler you can see in the video link below. Works fine but could do better.


So I designed new water coolers, they are but a better version of my actual water cooled heat sink block in use, made in my garage with an axe and a hack saw... lol

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Both upper type of holes (filament and water) have the same thread cut in, the filament lower holes have no thread (just 6.8mm ot up to 7 mm diameter hole) for the chimera style throats.

The fixing holes on the back are M3 for the attachement to the printer, the fixing holes for filament hotneck on the side flange are M3, the holes to fix the horseshoe are 3.2 mm and the thread in the horse shoe holes are M3, I tried to make it as simple as I could from this point of view.


The thread on the water and filament holes is 1/8X2 imperial.

The front horizontal hole to be corked is M6.

The tunnel holes back to front and sidewise for water transfer are 5mm diameter but this is not critical, I can go down to 4 mm diameter or worse case scenario 3 mm diameter, I tested first my proof of concept with 2 mm diameter inner water PTFE tube and worked nicelly with that little water, and going to 8mm inner diameter tube dropped my teperature down by 6 Celsius, so I reckon the transfer holes can go as low as 3mm if that might sort out some machining problem.



Of course keeping them around 5mm is better, the more water it passes, the better the cooling it is, the higher printing temperature can be achieved.



And I know any other low price 3D printer owner has the same issues when going to print with different support material, and that ties them to low temperature filaments like PLA and ABS, while they dream to go PETG, Nylon or even Polycarbonate, so I think there is a market for my gadget.


But first I need to make sure it works flawlesly, than I need to make sure I have production back up and good prices (or the Chinese will just copy me in a week and outsell me in a month making our efforts worthless)

We have China as a competitor in anything now, they dont give a shit on Intelectual Property rights.

But they also are poor quality revers engineers so their products are at least bad if not useless, and strange enough they never invent enything, just make poor clones in large numebrs.


Stay tuned, and I hope soon I can offer you for sale this little gem of engineering that has eaten up a few months of my life in prototyping and testing.