Customizeable Cooling Fan Blades

Update 2:

There is now another update that aims at recreating the original blades even more accurate. Therefore I introduced a second bending for the blades. Because the blades are now a surface bent in all three dimensions, the rendering of the model is everything but trivial. Using OpenSCAD to render takes depending on the settings more than 20 minutes! If you don't want to wait that long, you can use the previous file Customizeable_Fan_Blades.scad instead of the new one Customizeable_Fan_Blades_Advanced.scad. Another way to render the model faster is using a server based online service instead of a local OpenSCAD installation.

Furthermore I changed from setting an angle to influence the strength of the bowing to setting the bowing radius.

The variables are all explained in the comments in detail, so please read them carefully if you don't understand something, feel free to ask.

Update 1:

Just uploaded an update. The blades itself are now perpendicular to the center circle over their entire size which should optimize the air flow a little bit.

Explanation:

Since I broke of many blades of my original 40mm fan by accident, I thought about repairing it with 3D printed parts which is much cheaper than buying a replacement since the printed blades only cost a few cent.

Although such things have already been made, none of them matched my expectations, because I want to replace the whole blade part and not just the blades itself to keep the full area for the airflow and I wanted the fan to be customizeable to a large extend to be able to even optimize the fan and adjust everything to my specific needs.

Because of this I created my own fan blades design which is mostly customizeable using the following parameters:

• Overall_Thickness: The thickness of the whole part.
• Outer_Diameter_Blades: The diameter of the complete fan with blades.
• Thickness_Blades: The thickness of the blades perpendicular to their surface.
• Amount_Blades: The amount of blades in the whole fan.
• Bowing_Blades: An angle to adjust how much the blades are bent.
• Angle_Blades: The mean angle of the blades to the xy-plane.
• Inner_Diameter_Body: The diameter of the inner hole where the magnetic ring is fitted into.
• Thickness_Body: The thickness of the walls for the inner part of the blades.
• Axle_Diameter: The diameter of the small hole the axle of the fan is fitted into.

The default values in the comments in the scad file are the values I measured on the original ANET fan blades using a caliper. Using these values I created the stl file supplied in the file section.

There are no restrictions on the parameters although some values might not give you a useable result. The preview does not work properly because of the large amount of vertices. You need to render the model to get a correct result, which takes some time.

Currently the model is designed for 40mm fans. The model can be customized to any other fan size using the customization parameters.

If you like it, you may also check out my other Anet A8 and 3d printing things:

• Improved Customizeable Anet A8 E3Dv6 Mount with 40mm Fan Mount
• Filament Guides for the Anet A8 in 6 variations (0°, 45°, 90°) Vertical and Horizontal
• Anet A8 - Original X Axis Mounts V2
• Linear Bushing / Bearing - LM8UU - IGUS like - with mount
• Spoolhoder tube to lower rotational resistance (requires two axle bearings)
• Cable Clip (Anet like)