Lightweight 40mm fan grille

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For those who want to shave every gram off their printing head in order to fight ringing, or simply want some new stylish grilles to pimp their printer, here is a compact and low-noise replacement for the popular iron fan grilles.

If you print this in ABS with no infill, no more than 2 shells, and thin extrusions, you can get this to weigh 1.20 grams or maybe even less. The iron grilles on my printer weigh 4.14 g each, so by replacing both, I can lose 5.88 g. That's not much, but every little bit helps to reduce the inertia of the printing head and the wobble when it takes sharp corners.

There is a 3 mm thick and a 4 mm thick model. The latter will require slightly more material but it places the grille 1 mm farther from the fan, and this reduces noise.

I also offer models that have built-in 3 mm stand-offs. If like on the FlashForge Creator Pro, your fan grilles are mounted with those tiny 3 mm tall rings that always manage to fall and get lost in some nook or cranny of your printer when you disassemble the extruders, then replacing both the grilles and the rings with this single 3D printed grille, will get rid of that problem forever.

As you can see on the photos, the right fan is mounted with nylon screws. This is because the stepper motor is not mounted, only a dummy placeholder to trigger the endstop. Using nylon screws in this case shaves off another few grams. (Of course I use metal screws when I need to mount the stepper for dual extrusion.)

The starting point for designing this, was a grille generated with Customizable Fan Grille (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:188358) by DanielStein.

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