I've been poking at this design for a few months now. My replicator 2 is pretty reliable, but I hated the extruder. I had originally come up with a way to use an E3D v6 + titan on it, but it was big and bulky. I knew a titan aero would be a great extruder for this machine. Here's what the V1 looked like. Just a really bare bones mount and fan shroud. The shroud actually splits the airflow to bring it around to both sides of the nozzle, but it's not well optimized right now, I want to run some FEA on it, but prototyping a few designs and doing some hot wire anemometer tests would probably be more effective. It's a tight fit around the hot end Printed in ABS with enough room for a silicone sock should keep it from warping or melting. Might try and print it on the multijet fusion at work The first try was a failure. I had a bad "guide" in the model which blocked a portion of the airflow. I also had someone else set up the print and they didn't orient like I wanted so both test pieces broke pretty quick Note how left stream shoots forward and not towards middle like right channel. Water seems to make a good flow test The goal is to evenly split the flow in a way that gets balanced airflow from either direction: I don't think it's quite there yet though. I wired up the V1 design and thought it was ready to start printing, but it turned out the nozzle was about a 5-10mm away from the bed. Luckily I found some spacers from old TV mounts. They're plastic but should work well enough for now There also really wasn't any great way to manage the wire harness, so I went back to CAD and worked on a next generation design. Minor tweaks to the airflow path (shown above), wire management points, and reinforced the fan shroud to reduce it breaking apart. I still have some concerns with the design, but I'll hopefully get this printed and start putting it together again. All part of the process of converting this bot to a PC machine Anyways just wanted to share and hopefully encourage me to get this thing finished and have a working printer again
the other nice way to confirm the airflow underneath - set a bowl of water on the build plate and lower the head down close to it and observe the disturbance pattern across the surface.