I had a request to show some results of adding a cooling fan to the Portabee, so here's the first comparison. The model is from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:106595, I'm just showing the head piece in these photos. I think the results speak for themselves, fan cooling creates a sharper model.

The prints haven't been cleaned up at all, the left one is with fan cooling, the right one had the fan unplugged. It's a small amount of difference for this model, but it's clear that the model on the right is more droopy and 'melty' even though the temperature for the filament was 175C, quite low.




Here are close ups of each print.

With cooling:


Without cooling:


The natural PLA makes it difficult to take photos unfortunately, I will try and take better shots with darker colours for another post.

This model was sliced with Cura at 0.15 layer height, 1mm shell thickness, 1mm bottom/top, 20% fill density and both printed at 20mm/s (Portabee recommended setting is 30mm/s, with higher speed the cooling makes even more noticeable difference), retraction was enabled.

The prints were done onto a glass surface directly with just a layer of diluted PVA applied. Temperature was 175C for the filament and 50C for the bed.

-i