I think the fan in my print head is going to die

The small fan attached to the head is much weaker, and is intended to clear the lens housing of smoke. It is referred to as “purge air” in the Glowforge software.

That is correct.

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Then I’m sure that the other one is the one that was causing my problem. I will experiment further to see what it does now that I’ve cleaned those contacts.

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I wouldn’t recommend removing the carriage without direction to do so from Support.

Once you are well out of warranty, though… The rear wheels are spring loaded. Gently pulling forward on the carriage will allow the front wheels to clear the guide rail. At that point, it comes off fairly easy.

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You guys are brave, I love it. Thanks for posting all this stuff, really good to share.

I haven’t even contacted support officially yet. So far it seems to be running fine but I haven’t done a long print on it since the contact cleaning. I don’t recall wiping down those contacts as being on the list of things to do during a cleaning, so I never did it. I will re-read those instructions to be sure but if it’s not there as a cleaning step then it probably should be.

That blow out fan, or whatever it’s called, looks easy to replace too if it’s not hard to get the bottom carriage off. I hadn’t even realized that was there, I thought the “purge air” fan was the one generating all that air. Is there a more detailed set of information about the hardware than the one marked Beta that contains the unpacking and cleaning instructions?

one last thought :wink: There are 4 pins to the fan, is it 2 speed or is one of those feedback from the tachometer that many of these fans have? Would the firmware know if it wasn’t spinning at full speed and would it have sent me any notification to that fact? Theres not a whole lot of information in the web interface on the state of the machine but it certainly didn’t popup any errors at me while I was printing, it just kept going even when the fan stopped running.

Actually, you have officially contacted Support. A posting in this section generates a support ticket.

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Ah, well we shall see what happens then :slight_smile:

On a four pin fan you have power, ground, control to set the speed and a tacho signal to report the speed.

Yes the GF should be aware the fan is not spinning and be able to alert you. However it seems all but the totally essential sensors are ignore at this time. I.e. it looks at the coolant temperature and the safety interlocks but not much else. I cannot imagine why they can’t implement such simple things in three years. However looking at some comments in the source code they put a lot of effort into the fade routine for the LEDs. Looks like the person who wrote it had far too much time on their hands.

Took me less time to write a real time operating system from scratch. Also took me less time to design a 3D printer from scratch in my spare time having no prior knowledge. Can anybody explain why progress is so slow? Is there less than one full time developer working on it?

And I will beat the horse as long as GF still claim it does all these things that it doesn’t. Remember this video from 17 months ago claiming 50 sensors? Does the deceleration of a good cup of coffee end a print yet?

How hard would it be to detect fans not spinning and produce a meaningful error? Especially as no air assist can potentially cause a fire.

There are some infra red detectors in the lid. The only thing I can imagine they are for is flame detection but I doubt they do anything at the moment and they have never been mentioned.

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If you don’t like what @palmercr says then by all means block or ignore his posts, but your last 2 posts have been thinly veiled insults and uncalled for - he is not writing to you, not writing at you. You just jumped in to flog your own dead horse.

If you don’t like it at least have the strength to just ignore it instead of inflating the issue.

I try but every once in awhile it just gets to be just a little much. If we could mute a person I would but that’s not an option. Ignoring the continuous denigration of GF gets difficult at times but I’ll delete my posts because you’re right - they’re not helping change things either

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To be fair if you’re calling @jamesdhatch out for going off topic, this thread isn’t about @palmercr ‘s theoretical ability to outcode the Glowforge team.

I totally get palmercr’s frustrations, it does seem like there’s more that it could do, but I also see jamesdhatch’s point: the Glowforge team is clearly not going to share their future plans nor explain every decision that led to where we are now. That horse is indeed very injured if not dead.

I get it, @bdm is frustrated too - first time I saw him lose it was after his delivery got pushed to Nov - not at all Zen. Happens to all of us. It’s easier for those of us who have our GF to overlook how frustrating it is to still be waiting. It’s like building a house - you hate every delay and swear you’ll never do it again but then you move in and the reality outweighs the grief getting there and you forget about the trouble.

My problem with Palmer is that he’s said he has no intention of accepting his delivery until they’re all done which just means he’ll be posting his negativity for awhile still. It can just suck the life out of the forum sometimes. But that’s my cue to step back from the GF (I spend a lot of the time while it’s cutting reading the forum - gives me something to do. :slightly_smiling_face:).

Ha! One of the great misconceptions there.
Nothing wrong with emotions, nothing at all, even Anger - the problem is when we hold on to them and refuse to let them pass through us, thus they end up controlling us.

For the record i was not angered… if anything it was totally expected - it was just my way of saying i have great faith in the ability of Glowforge to consistently fail.

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Thank you so much for the details. I’m looking into it now. As soon as I have more information I’ll update this thread.

Please give this a try:

  1. Turn off your Glowforge
  2. Holding only the finished black surfaces, grasp the printer head as shown. Pull gently up and back to disengage the magnets and remove the head.
    image
  3. Push down fully on the wire ribbon tab to unplug the wire ribbon from the printer head. Pull the wire ribbon gently away and tuck it into the laser arm.
    image
  4. Take a clear photo of the gold pins inside the printer head where you just unplugged the wire ribbon
  5. Pick up the printer head and wire ribbon. Make sure the tab on the wire ribbon is facing up. Slide the ribbon into the head until it clicks.
  6. As shown, lower the printer head over the metal plate so that it rests next to the two round posts. Then push it gently away from you – you’ll feel a “click” as magnets pull the printer head until it sits snugly atop the metal plate.
  7. Gently move the printer head so it sits under the camera
  8. Turn your Glowforge back on
  9. Send us the photo of the gold pins from step 4.

Once you’ve done that please try another print, and let us know if the fan at the bottom of the print head stay on during the whole print.

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Neither the pins on the bottom of the print head nor the pads on the carriage board were visible dirty or glazed, but since cleaning them, which I just did with the same Zeiss wipe I had first used on the lenses, I’ve not seen the fan skip a beat at all. I am calling it fixed and will make sure that I make that part of my regular maintenance as well.

Thanks so much folks!

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I’m glad you resolved it! I’m going to close this thread - if the problem reoccurs, go ahead and post a new topic. Thanks for letting us know about this!