Flexi-arm fan holder
2 Feb 2019Download from Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3391466
While making up some cables recently I decided my ‘helping hands’ needed replacing.
I remembered seeing an interesting 6-armed version online, which comes with a fan to blow the flux fumes away from your face. This means you can use an arm or two to hold the thing, and others to hold the part you’re trying to attach.
It’s pretty useful, but they get you to mount the fan by gripping it in one of the crocodile clips, which doesn’t seem ideal. You can probably guess where this is going by now, but this seemed like a job for the 3D printer.
Designing the mount
The fan is a little 30x30mm one so I need something that could hold it and then push into the hole on the end of the arm. I quickly created a design in Fusion 360, but I forgot to take any screen-shots of the first version, sorry about that.
After slicing it at 0.3mm, for a quick draft print, and waiting 20 minutes I ended up with this…
On the up-side it fits the fan well enough for it to hold in by itself, however it’s a little thin and the slot where the cable comes out needs to be a bit bigger.
After a few tweaks I ended up with this:
Printing with the same options as the previous print produced this:
This holds the fan well enough without any extra clips and the quick print is fine for this so it’s done.