301–310 of 311 posts
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Silver is the ideal color for hiding dirt. I had a silver car once. Unless you drove it down a dirt road during a rainstorm, you basically never had to wash it.
Noctua also makes silver fans
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Tighter tolerance isn't universally a good thing. It might make the fan more susceptible to damage due to mishandling or dust. They might be selling a fan that has a shorter useful life for no real benefit.
As a physicist, it's not at all clear to me that tighter tolerances would lead to higher efficiency or less noise. I assume it shakes out in the CFD simulations, but I would be curious to know the explanation. I thought the primary gain in efficiency came from the large blades, with the blade shape the next most important factor. Gaps between the blade and housing feels like a single-digit percent effect.
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> They are going inside the computer where they aren't visible. Speak for yourself :) My computer is pretty open, the fans are visible through the front and through the side panel. I don't run RGB either though but I do like to style it. And of course the "form over function" is part of that market niche that really pays a lot for something like a fan. Noctua aren't that special, as others have mentioned there are mu…
Any examples for these cheaper brands with same performance?
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That’s not what the article says, they relate it to reproducibility of the manufacturing process: “Achieving such small tip clearances is essentially at the absolute limit of what injection moulding can consistently reproduce”. Though maybe they misphrased that, as for example Lego pieces have significantly smaller tolerances and are also manufactured using injection molding.
Clearance vs tolerance is important. Clearance includes all of the things I said.
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They are targeting people who want nearly-silent fans for computing devices and will pay considerably higher than average prices for them. I have several of them, and they are vastly quieter than the competition. Wouldn't be worth it in a commercial space, but I want my house to be quiet.
In my experience fans from manufacturers like Arctic can be almost as quiet similar Noctua, but cost 50% less. The difference definitely isn't vast for most models, although admittedly there's more QC issues and variation than with Noctua. A lot of Noctua sales come from their brand value. People put Noctua fans into their gaming PC's, use headphones while gaming on them, and then turn off the PC. You don't really ne…
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Normally I love this kind of article too because I consider it engineering, not marketing, the product name dropping at the end just reinforces the message. But either I'm missing some details that could have been spelled our more clearly, or the engineers were taking a break when the marketers were writing some parts. I'd love to stand corrected if someone more informed has details. > advanced polymers such as Sterr…
Expert here. When very precision molds are made, what Noctua talks about in "multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised" is the standard process for this type of stuff. (Gears, bottle caps, or any molds than make 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128x of the same part in one shot, require that you start with "steel safe" geometry, meaning you mold the…
I knew the technology itself can have tight enough tolerances that are not a concern from an engineering perspective when talking about a 0.5-0.7mm clearance, but no details about the challenges of this LCP.
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As a physicist, it's not at all clear to me that tighter tolerances would lead to higher efficiency or less noise. I assume it shakes out in the CFD simulations, but I would be curious to know the explanation. I thought the primary gain in efficiency came from the large blades, with the blade shape the next most important factor. Gaps between the blade and housing feels like a single-digit percent effect.
For the same reason a winglet is used on an airplane, or a ducted fan is more efficient than a propeller: there is a large pressure difference on the end of a wing or propeller, and the high pressure side will jump around to the low pressure side and cause a tip vortex. This causes an induced drag, which moves the lift vector backwards (as drag, but not skin friction drag). Higher aspect (think wind turbine blades or…
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Expert here. When very precision molds are made, what Noctua talks about in "multiple tuning iterations are required until the geometry, cooling, gating, and moulding parameters are perfectly stabilised" is the standard process for this type of stuff. (Gears, bottle caps, or any molds than make 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128x of the same part in one shot, require that you start with "steel safe" geometry, meaning you mold the…
Noob here. If you dont mind ive got some questions for you! Ive recently started messing with the idea of making my own model car kits as a hobby. I understand a lot of the basics, but have never done anything like this before. Im obviously not going to make kits in mass, but, i plan on doing injection molding using polystyrene. I do not currently have a cnc, but have been eyeing a SainSmart, though they say "can do…
On the small CNC that will work with aluminum... There is a whole tradespace around how small of a feature you are trying to mill vs spindle speed vs machine stiffness & spindle runout. If you were to get something like a HASS you can sorta do it all, but when you get into the hobby stuff, you need to be very certain about what smaller set of machining limitations you will be dealing with and if they will still get you where you need to go. You need to work backwards from what actual tolerances you need to hold for the downstream thing to be able to work. (For instance, if you are making an aluminum mold, when you machine it, you will most likely be repositioning the work piece... if your machine isn't square enough so that when you flip the part on it's side or upside down, then do your next op, the part may not have been square to begin with, so now you have something that won't match the other thing you are trying to mate to.)
I build a 2'x5' 3 axis with ATC, starting from a CNCdepot concept and did my own control. I probably spend as much money on precision straight edges, levels, 90deg blocks, lapping tools, etc that were required to build a machine that could hold tolerances to 0.001", which is probably where you need to be landing to have molds that work.
I guess I am just trying to say it's a very big and ugly can of worms you are opening up.
Before buying anything, you might just want to try using firstcut/protolabs. They will machine the aluminum molds and mold the parts for you. Price per part is not going to be pretty, but it's going to be way less than spending thousands on machines that will never get you to where you want to go.
As for "desktop" molding, there is some startup now pushing their kludged together machine, maybe that is the one you are referencing. I'd stay far away from that thing. I think they were charging a couple $k for it, I feel like you need to be at 5x-10x that for anything reasonable. But at that point, the amount of power and infrastructure you need is well outside anything you'd want to put in your house or even garage. Don't really have a good answer for you here.
One thing to look at, if you are doing those model kits where like 20 parts are all in one flat sheet and you twist them to remove them, people are starting to make these on FDM 3D printers, which might be worth looking at. Now you can prototype and do production on the same machine, which at your stage, is the right place to be.
Explains why LEGO had a leg up for multiple years. You can’t just change the color pigments and hope the parts fit in the same way. Of course these times are over and other brick manufacturers caught up or overtook Lego.
Overtook Lego? In what way, quality of the bricks? Because Lego is still the largest toy company in the world by revenue.
Just want to mention I have no beef or issue with Lego. I say that you get great offerings from other brands as well now.
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Overtook Lego? In what way, quality of the bricks? Because Lego is still the largest toy company in the world by revenue.
Yes quality. I forgot the Chinese manufacturer that resells their bricks to pantasia or moldking. But the quality especially for metal or translucent bricks is on par and in a lot of cases better than the Lego offerings. And calling Lego a toy company is a stretch. Their main demographic is 30-50 year olds with disposable income. Just want to mention I have no beef or issue with Lego. I say that you get great offerin…