There&#x27;s an interim one at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OnlyFans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OnlyFans&#x2F;</a>

OnlyFans lost its purported audience years ago, when they made the decision to include human adult content in addition to fan-related content only. The adult content quickly took over and now you can barely find anything relating to fans on there.Reddit is a much better place for that now, and if you aren&#x27;t particularly precious about documentary-style fact reporting, you&#x27;re much better off browsing r&#x2F;fanfiction.

I&#x27;m disappointed that this is on YT, shouldn&#x27;t it be on OnlyFans?

There is Fan Show Down on yt where people are trying to beat the original Noctua fan design:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI-nqCCk-wfCU9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI...</a>

just make sure there aren&#x27;t any rounded corners

I believe the restriction on personal replication of patented designs is a US thing (only?). At least in Germany, you are legally allowed to make patented things for yourself or science to some capacity. The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.The US restriction is quite mad, if you think about it. Freedom my ass.

Unless they still have an unexpired patent on the design, it&#x27;s completely legal to clone. Physical objects simply do not have the same type of copyright protection, and there is considerable precedent in making compatible components --- the most notable example being the automotive aftermarket.

Unless they have patents on their fan impleller geomeries, the IP they&#x27;re referring to is likely just trade secrets. Trade secrets do have legal protections in the US, but those protections are mainly about disclosing or stealing those secrets, not about physically inspecting something and deriving the trade secret that way.Not sure about the tech aspect of 3D scanning or if that would be accurate enough; I don&#x27;t have any experience there to draw on.

Thermaltake already makes a clone:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;noctua-nf-a12x25-vs-toughfan-120" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;noctua-nf-a12x25-vs-to...</a>Noctua seems fine so long as you’re not copying the color scheme and branding. Interestingly TT had a 140mm version before Noctua. Noctua seems happy being the premium option.

There could be geometrically tiny optimizations that lead to an outsized impact in noise and flow by turbulence reduction. While optimizing an impeller with computational FSI (fluid structure interaction) is not as hard as before, it still is not trivial. And it&#x27;s these (perhaps small) optimizations that justify Noctua being 5x more expensive than generic black fan.

I would think so, or by taking cross sections. Its hard to believe they have some miraculous geometry that needs guarding anyway. Maybe they are trying to dissuade people who might try to 3d print an impeller.3d models for industrial fan manufacturers (Sanyo,NMB) are widely available.

You really don’t need to 3d scan, I’m not a cad expert and it took me just a few evenings to replicate pretty much the blade profile of my Noctua fans based on photos

I think they are trying to stop random small shops from making cosmetic copies that compete with their products.Crude copies with convincing appearance would tarnish their brand. Visibly crude copies stop performance data of such copies from being mistaken as representative of actual products.

Yes, by no means did I comment to take away from the great service they are doing to the builders. I&#x27;m a Noctua fan!I was just curious.

From what I remember from my NASA friend, a few companies, hired a few fluid flow engineers, during the defense bust, and designed fan blades that remarkably increased air flow. ( think profiles like air plane wing ). Something happened and in a few years, there were good fans, and there were great fans.I happen to own a pair of Noctura fans, and wow! They are great, so I would assume that some heavy lifting was done in fluid flow.

Yes, though the fidelity offered by faithful CAD would be both easier to interpret correctly and might even hint at the CAD feature tree.Kudos to them for releasing models useful for integration.

Also this would not account for cooling shrinkage, a very annoying problem when making high quality parts to spec.

If your goal is to reproduce it you could just make a cast of the fan and then use that to make a mold.It’d be a bit tricky since you wouldn’t really have a convenient spot for a planar parting line, but should be possible.

The 3d scan is generally used as a base for your cad model, you don’t print it it directly, you instead replicate the shapes in your cad software, that gives you pretty much infinite precision thanks to NURBS<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Non-uniform_rational_B-spline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Non-uniform_rational_B-spline</a>

you&#x27;d probably have to do a bit of fixing on a model to get close

My guess is that both 3D printed fans and production fans get balanced, but the production fans have an extra bit of design, that makes the profile sail at both a wider speed range, and peaks at a higher speed.

Wouldn&#x27;t there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?

&gt; To protect our intellectual property, certain features – such as fan impeller geometries – have been slightly modified while remaining visually very close to the actual product.Noob question: If someone wants to copy their design with no respect to their intellectual property, can&#x27;t they just 3D scan?

The fan body itself follows standard 120&#x2F;140mm dimensions, but I needed the smaller details for my design, the rubber dampers, anti-vibration corners, cable routing clips. Those don&#x27;t show up cleanly in the datasheet, so I ended up using a caliper. That&#x27;s the part the official CAD would have helped most with.

Aren&#x27;t their dimensions standard? Many people replace other fans with Noctua&#x27;s, after all.

I was just thinking the same! Spent few hours a month ago measuring 120mm noctua fans to build a custom mounting bracket for a rack cooling module I was making.Never finished it because I kept having to tweak and remeasure, but now I can definitely go back and finish it!

Would have saved me time on a 3D printer I designed a while back. I integrated Noctua fans and ended up measuring mounting dimensions by hand. Having the official CAD models would have made fan integration a lot cleaner.

Probably best to look up the local prices yourself? We don&#x27;t know where you live.There are fans that are cheaper that come close to noctua, but noctua are one of the best fans you can buy.

You&#x27;re not going to find a significantly quieter 80mm fan. It needs to be bigger so the blade passing frequency is in a less noticeable range.

Well the cheapest crap fans are almost free, Noctua fans are certainly not free. So the added cost is the entire price of a Noctua fan.

How much more is the BOM for a silent fan like in Noctua? I recently bought a controller for my well water pump, and it has two 80mm fans for cooling. Sounds like an aircraft when taking off and doesn&#x27;t seem to move much air. I&#x27;m planning to replace them with Noctua fans.

Tweet with image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Noctua_at&#x2F;status&#x2F;2048688184314273947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Noctua_at&#x2F;status&#x2F;2048688184314273947</a>Example download: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.noctua.at&#x2F;en&#x2F;support&#x2F;downloads?product=nf-a12x25-pwm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.noctua.at&#x2F;en&#x2F;support&#x2F;downloads?product=nf-a12x25...</a>

That’s so neat! I will be able to compare to my own CAD models from when I 3d printed my PC :D

Especially because they previously denied his request for the files (even when they&#x27;ve sponsored him), stating the same IP issue.

The Fan Showdown YouTube guy is going to have a field day

Good to know, didn&#x27;t realize Mikrotik did this too. Useful for homelab planning where rack space and airflow actually matter.

Mikrotik does this for some of their parts as well

&quot;Vercel Security Checkpoint&quot;&quot;enable javascript to continue&quot;Bugger...

Not just 3d printing, the proposed law applies to cnc too.

Meanwhile 3D printing is being banned in US states supposedly to prevent people from creating gun parts, because just buying a gun in the US isn&#x27;t doable for a criminal. But in reality it&#x27;s because ownership of production and machines is about to get banned for the lower classes.

Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans