Replacing Fans - Disconnect hotend from carriage?
I need to replace both fans on my MK3. I've had the part cooling fan as a replacement from support for a while and now that the hotend cooling fan has a pinched wire from my assembly, I figured I might as well do both at the same time.
From looking at everything, it appears I need to disassemble most of the extruder, or at least separate it from the carriage, since the part cooling fan plug needs to get through the carriage.
Any tips on doing this? Haven't seen a support page on doing this, but might have missed it.
TIA
Ray
Re: Replacing Fans - Disconnect hotend from carriage?
Short answer? Yes.
Longer answer? Bad design; there really needs to be a better cable interface. But where would you put all the connectors to make it more serviceable?
Re: Replacing Fans - Disconnect hotend from carriage?
Did it all the past 2 nights. Wasn't too painful, the only guidance / tips I would recommend are:
1. Basically just need to take off the back plate on the carriage, and then take off the part cooling fan and then disconnect the hot end from the carriage as well. That is needed in order to get the part cooling fan out from behind the Pinda probe wiring.
2. I replaced the hot end fan with a Noctura from Amazon. The only gotcha there is that while the kit has an extension cable, it still isn't long enough to reach all the way back to the control board. Additionally, the connector to the control board is a locking plug and the kit doesn't come with that type of plug. So, I wound up cutting a generous portion of the old cable in order to keep the original plug. BONUS: the Noctura kit came with a set of small compression / crimp wire connectors for connecting the fan to a proprietary plug, so I was in business! the end result looked like:
New Fan --> Extension cable from Kit (with end cut off) --> crimp connectors --> original fan cable end
Probably could have skipped the extension cable but wanted to keep the original end on the fan itself, and if I have to replace it again, it will be an easy drop in replacement to the Extension cable.
I also had the textile sleeve to replace the original plastic wound sleeve. HIGHLY recommend doing this. Probably discussed elsewhere, but when I unwound the original plastic sleeve, at the joints of the sleeve, it had started rubbing off the hotend heater wire insulation. three or four spots along the way. Wasn't all the way through, but definitely would have caused issues down the road. Wrapped each spot with electrical tape.
(FYI - I've got about 2,100 hours on this printer).
Everything is back up and running.
Re: Replacing Fans - Disconnect hotend from carriage?
Good to hear it wasn't a horrid task (when the time comes my plan is to cut and splice - or - you can usually pull the fan label to get to the solder points). I replaced my spiral wrap around 2000 hours, along with all the bearings. I had worn spots on wires and Einsy box parts. In extreme cases, I've read the spiral wrap has cut through wires, especially in production use. I'm still not happy with how the hot end wires enter the bundle mid path such that the sleeve bulges at that spot and can rub the Einsy box - I'm looking for a better method there.