Hey folks, Alan Mandic, MandicReally here.
"The Mad Scientist of All Trades".
I've got the MakeBlock xTool D1 laser back there on the floor.
I've used it a grand total of one time and...
I broke it.
I'll show you in a moment what I broke about it.
It's an easy fix.
I had to design a part, 3D print the part,
and now I'm going to have to do some soldering and reassemble it.
It's really not a big deal, but I thought I'd bring you folks
along for a little project, something I've got to do around the shop.
I want to review that thing.
I want to use that thing.
I want to give it a chance,
but I need to fix it so I can even do any of that.
So let's get into it.
The fan on that thing was a little loud,
and the crosshairs that are supposed to line up the laser and give you an idea
of where it's going to go, were wildly inaccurate on it.
So I was going to see if I could just correct that.
This is not a wireless fan.
It's a 50mm 12 volt fan,
and well it's no longer attached.
You can see the fan wires are just awfully short.
So when I tried to pull them out of the way they just came right off the fan.
And I'm not going to even bother trying to fix that fan.
I tried looking up this part number on this fan
and I really wasn't finding anything, but it really doesn't matter.
It's louder
than I cared for it to be anyway, so I would be looking for a replacement.
But it's a 50mm fan so it's not like it can buy a Noctua fan
that's just going to directly replace this thing.
It's a 50 by 20mm fan, all the fans
I can get locally are like 50 by 10 millimeter.
And you know what? It doesn't make any sense anyway.
I had a spare 80mm Noctua Redux fan
floating around in my supplies.
So I designed and made this adapter.
If it's going to replace the 50mm fan with an 80mm fan.
As well as above the fan on the original D1
it has this cable management and grill, fan grill on it.
So I went ahead and designed a new fan grill
that reuses their logo, keeps it on there, and it'll be on top of the fan.
Also I integrated the cable management
into the actual adapter piece that I made for the fan.
If you happen to have an xTool D1 laser and you want to consider
doing this upgrade,
quiet it down a little bit & get a little more airflow over the laser unit,
there will be a link of a description down
below to my Thangs page where you can download the fil.
And follow along in this video and I'll show you how to do it.
If you want to learn how I designed that Adapter piece in Fusion 360,
I'm going to insert a quick little clip here from a Tik Tok video
where I filmed while I was making that adapter, walking through steps
so you can check that out.
Now I'm in Fusion 360 and I already pulled in a model for a 50mm fan, an 80mm fan,
both of which I was able to download on GrabCad.
That's a place I often
go to get pre-rendered 3D models of things like fans or motherboards.
Things are going to be designing around.
With those pulled in here I'm going to go ahead and create a sketch
on the face of this 50mm fan, after which point I don't need the fan any more
so I can make that disappear.
And then I'm going to extrude it up 20mms.
I repeated that same process with a little bit of change on the 80 millimeter side.
And now you can see the two halves of my adapter going from 80 mm down to 50.
Now I'm going to show you how I actually make a funnel
to knock that down to from one
point to the other. I need to create a sketch on
each of these faces where they're facing each other.
Once I had that done, I want to head up to the Create menu and choose Loft.
Now I will select my two sketch, and when I select the second one,
it fills in between.
Now, to hollow this out, I could use the Shell function,
or I can use Loft on these little intersections
of the spokes here from one to the other.
Which is what I'm going to do.
Same as before.
Once I select one sketch face and then the other,
it wants to cut in between the two.
And you can see the red preview of what's going to be cut out inside of you.
Which now provides me this funnel neck down adapter design
and this weird kind of flange thing here.
I can actually delete this just by selecting it and hitting Delete.
Repeat that again, and it'll just continue the geometry up.
I use the bolt pattern that I had here, and some negative Extrusions
to create the bolt pattern for bolting this onto the laser.
Now I'm just going to finish it off with some minor detail stuff
such as rounding off corners and such then I will slice the design.
Ideally, I should put a quick disconnect on here,
but I'm just going to go ahead and solder The power and ground wire
which on this Noctua fan, are yellow and black.
Yellow being 12 volt, black being ground.
I'm going solder them right to the wires that I have here
because there is a connector like 50mm away from where I am,
I could disconnect it,
but I'm worried that I wouldn't be able to plug it back in in this situation.
So I'm just going to play it
safe and leave it connected right now and move forward.
Let's flip on the Weller soldering iron
and now it's time to strip the wires on the laser side.
As well as the wires on the fan that we're going to be soldering together.
Twist them together and solder them.
Now I actually cut down the wire length on the fan a little bit.
So I didn't have a ton of excess, but I left more than I necessarily needed,
so I would have like something
to work with if I ever need to redo this because of a bad connection.
I twisted the wires together in kind of a strange fashion,
specifically to bulk up the thickness of the wire
because I didn't have particularly thin heat shrink to go over this,
so I wanted to make sure the heat shrink I had was going to shrink down onto there.
So this isn't necessarily the way most folks would twist wire
and then solder it, but it worked for the situation.
Time for the heat gun on the heat shrink.
I also slid some nylon braided sleeving over the wire, as well as heat
shrink to go on top of that
so that I had a really well-protected connection
and it looks like it fits with the rest of the build.
The fan adapter just slips directly in place of where the 50 mm fan was
previously.
It has a little notch in the bottom corner for the fan wiring to pass through.
I printed mine in clear PETG
just in case the temperatures in that area might get up there a little bit.
I think with constant airflow PLA would be fine, but I went with
PETG to be safe.
Now installing the screws, I just use the original fan screws
in the adapter, and that's what's going to hold it to the laser body
so that hardware can be reused.
The adapter has recessed holes,
which allow for those original screws to be fit in there.
Just a simple zip tie,
one of the ones provided with the D1 slips through the cable management area.
You do need to do this before you put the fan on and then it gives
a really nice arc to the cables, I think anyway.
This design uses M3 screws to hold the fan to the adapter,
and I'm just using the screw itself to tap threads into the 3D print,
which works out just fine due to the sizing of the holes,
at least on my printers.
Attach the grille and the fan with those and M3 screws to the adapter,
and that's the installation.
Let's fire this thing up and hear of a new fan.
Now it's time to run
tests cut with the new assembly altogether.
And that is a test cut completed,
this thing took about 40 minutes to do, and the X1, I keep saying X1!!
xTool D1 is back up and running.
Now there are some inconsistencies in this cut that I just did.
The engrave like completely skipped, angled,
and went off a little bit when it came to like the mouth section.
Don't know why that is.
And then the cut around the perimeter of the outside cut of it.
It started at one point and when it made its way all the way around the outline,
it missed connecting with the original cut start point with the finish point.
So I had to kind of break it out.
I'm gonna have to work with this thing
a little more, play with a little more and figure out what's going on.
There's various things that I need to either learn about this machine
or that are just flaws with this machine that I'll figure out in time.
All right, folks, that's going to wrap it up for this video.
We got the project on.
I got the thing back up and running.
As I mentioned earlier,
there's a link in a description down below if you want to download this file,
even if you don't have the xTool D1, please consider downloading that.
It helps support me.
And maybe you can take a look at the way
that I design things and get some inspiration for yourself.
Alright folks I hope you found this video interesting.
If you did, please drop it a LIKE.
Let me know in the COMMENTS, Are you going to pick up an xTool D1?
Are you interested in more workshop videos like this one?
Let me know in the COMMENTS down below.
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Keep on making, folks!