Useful 90º fan mount for 40x40x10 (+ space for a buck-converter) on motherboards or any other place

thingiverse

I've designed this fan bracket with the Flashforge Creator 3 in mind, but I've since made it usable for many other situations where you need to have some active cooling, and a mount was not provided while the space is limited. With the long slots, you can use this bracket anywhere you have two mount holes 52 to 65mm apart; the fan mount holes are 33mm apart, to fit standard 40mm cooling fans. The story begins when I've recently acquired a Flashforge Creator 3. Coming from a Creator Pro and then a Pro2, the latter ones were noisy in their stepper drivers, and their fans were noisy too, but almost acceptable during daytime. However the Creator 3 was like a vacuum cleaner, blimey I tought Mr. Henry was left switched on. Lots of noise from the extruder fans and especially from the mainboard. Had to do something about! Here we go, removed the two radial blower fans to cool the mainboard which were super noisy (even if the machine only had 1400hrs) at over 65Db. Also, those radial fans will have a poor airflow, being concentrated in a small area. I've since designed a bracket to fit 40x10 fans in the 55mm apart M4 mount holes for the original radial blower fans.  But the original fans run on 24v, and the NoiseBlocker (and all the other quality ones) run on 12v, so the bracket has a mount for a Buck-converter too. This one in the picture is the "AZ Delivery" you can find on Amazon, but there's enough room to mount other types you have on hand, you may have to drill two small holes for mini screws to secure your model of converter. Two sets of spacers can be printed, 4x8mm (5mm tall) and 5x10mm (14mm tall) should you need to add space for the Buck-converter or the bracket itself, your choice. You can make them taller/shorter by simply scaling up/down in your slicer program (just unlock "uniform scaling" or "keep ratio"). All neat and perfectly working. To improve the cooling even further, I've also made a use of those tiny heatsinks that were in a mixed pack, I thought I would never use them, but they can only do good here. The average operating noise of the motherboard is now below 40Db so virtually "silent". I would highly recommend this simple mod if you have a Creator 3. Next step, was to tackle the PSU cooling to remove the noisy 40x20mm fan; replaced with a 40x10 Noiseblocker, plus another one fitted right above the FET's. The PSU now has a better cooling with sub-40Db noise. Result!