Cooling fan questions

My RoBo came without an extruder-mounted cooling fan installed, but there was a 40mm fan included in the box. I never got around to installing it, but I would like to now. However, I have no idea where to attach it. The pictures I've seen on these forums mount the fan on the front of the x-carriage, but I think my printer uses a different version of that carriage since there are no holes on the front of mine. There are two holes on the right side, but mounting a fan there would make it bump against the z-axis rods.

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What I'd like to know is:

1a) Is it safe to drill some holes in the front of the x-carriage without messing up the bearings or rod?

1b) If I'm going to be drilling anyway, could I just stick the fan on the back of the x-carriage so my view of the print won't be obstructed?

2) The fan's wire is very short, assuming it's actually meant to mount on the x-carriage and follow the rest of those bundled wires up to the top of the printer and down to that Arduino board, so I'm guessing that I'll be extending it? I can do that easily enough with the 18-gauge wire and heat-shrink tubing I have on me, but I'm worried the extra fan was meant to cool something important at the bottom of the printer and the whole thing is going to catch fire one day if I don't put that fan where it was supposed to go.

3) Should I take the opportunity to expand the project and look into getting something like an EZStruder? I'm not entirely sure what it is and what it does, but it looks like a more convenient way to load filament and I lost the springs that hold the stock filament door shut back in August (the first of many small parts I've lost... it never ceases to amaze me how an empty, concrete garage floor could become such a black hole for anything that falls on it.)

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I'm sorry if my questions are obvious/simplified/vague or my jargon is off. I've been learning a lot since I got my RoBo, but I'm still very much a beginner in this field. I can count the number of times I've used a soldering iron on one hand and my go-to strategy for modifying anything is "just cut the damned wire and figure it out as you go", but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone on these forums who knows more about telescopes and Astrophotography technique than I do (We all have our "things", I guess. One day, when I'm proficient in all of this stuff, I hope to be able to pay it forward.)

If you have patience for one last question, can you give me some tips for reducing or eliminating the filament "leaking" ("oozing"?) from my nozzle when it reaches temperature? My workarounds at the moment are (1) to print extra skirt perimeters to ensure the initial glob won't wreck my prints and (2) going into Slic3r's settings and checking the box to randomize where the nozzle will start extruding perimeters (helps a ton; without it, I get little trees sticking out the sides of vertical walls)

Thanks so much for your time, patience, and advice!

 

Just realized that the title of this thread should be "Cooling fan and X-Carriage Questions". This ended up being a bigger barrage of questions than I had initially planned.

 

To answer some of your questions

the fan is for active cooling of your prints. As far as mounting goes there is a bracket you can print which will allow easy fitting to the carriage. It was designed by a forum member to allow for easy fitting of the e3d hotend, which in itself is a great and highly recommended upgrade. Check out the e3d thread the bracket link shoud be there.

I used that bracket when fitting my e3d and it works great

you are better off removing the whole x carriage for easy access

 

Unless I've missed one of the fan mounts that have been posted here, they all assume the x-carriage has mounting holes in the front. Mine does not, unfortunately.

 

I'm confused you have 2 fans included in your printer?

 

Ah, my wording was unclear. The RoBo came with one fan in a small plastic bag. There was no preinstalled fan and the one in the bag was the only one I received. I don't know why I wrote "extra", but it's probably because of the fan that came with the E3D hotend, which is wired directly to the power supply. The post ended up being too long for a thorough proofreading

 

It should have also come with a metal bracket to mount the fan on. Though I think this is a recent advancement since the china printers. If yours wasn't one of those then it might not.

 

Looks like I have a China printer in that case. Meh.

 

If you don't have the metal bracket email team robo and they'll ship you one.

 

I emailed them a couple of weeks ago about ordering their new custom heatbed, but they haven't gotten back with me yet. Not holding my breath for a quick reply at this point

I'll probably get an EZStruder at some point in the near future and just replace the whole thing with Leon Grossman's EZStruder/E3d X-carriage (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:192639). And I just noticed that his pictures don't show a part cooling fan, so I may need to tweak the model a bit before printing. I'm still getting used to this whole concept of having to be my own tech support. I've become extremely paranoid and assume nothing will work without modifications, so I think I may finally be getting there!