Hello. I have a Ortur Laser Master 2 Pro S2 and I recently got a Ortur Enclosure 2.0 to be able to vent the exhaust fumes (which is in my basement near a window) and got it all working. I have been engraving some hockey pucks and while the exhaust fan certainly helps in clearing out the fumes, I notice there is still a lingering smell of burnt rubber even a day later and notice a faint smell of it on my main floor. I also run an air assist, and have an air purifier right next to my laser. Testing out the fan itself, it doesn’t feel like it pulls enough air as I don’t feel it at the front of the laser. Would just putting a fan at the front to blow air to the back where the exhaust fan is help or any other solutions?
Sure, I do this when I do brass coins and when I drag out the led machine.
Surprisingly I found this pretty effective…if this is what you are thinking.
You can see the trail of brass on the aluminum base plate in front of the vent. This also means it’s still not picking up all the debris. It works best, like this, with smaller objects…
If you can smell it, you are breathing it and it is likely being distributed around your work area… probably why it has residual odor… Check out the local area (wipe it) with a white rag and see if the debris is coating your work area.
Hi.
Our sense of smell -and also brains for that matter- is more sensitive to the smells and odors we don’t like.
Even a minuscule amount of burning rubber or plastic odor will linger for a very long time.
Even with our abysmally poor sense of smell, the treshold of registering certain chemical compounds and molecules is also rather low.
That makes the task of removing artificial odors very difficult, no matter what the situation or whatever the origin of the odor.
As You of course should, but that makes the demands of the exhaust even greater than without air assist.
The bottom line is that in order to at least minimize the odors, the enclosure has to be either hermetically sealed (exept for the exhaust and appropriately located make-up air inlet of course), or(/and) the exhaust air volume has to be significantly larger than the air volume of the air assist.
If the air volumes are the same -or even worse the air assist volume is greater than the exhaust- there will always be at least some odor molecules that will find their way in the wrong place.
Thise range from useless to moderately useful, but generally aren’t intended for odor removal even though there may be active carbon filters (even real ones, not just black paper 
).
If it’s the “computer PSU” style of a axial fan shown in the manufacturers site, those are frankly rather useless in any ventilation applications.
Widely used and marketed for ventilation applications though, mainly because the cost is in the ballpark of 1-3€/$/£.
An adequately performing ventilation fan will set the manufacturer back 10-100 times the chosen currency.
While the air flow of such a “computer” fan can be adequate in free space and across electrical components or through the heatsink fins, any restrictions reduce the flow to zero, or pretty close to it.
Unfortunately that won’t work as intended with fumes and odors.
Just as the air assist, it will only cause more turbulence and possibly even more overpressure in the enclosure, making the situation actually worse.
While it can work to an extent with heavier than air particles as @jkwilborn demonstrated in his reply, for lighter than air molecules it just won’t work.
The best (IMO anyway) budget oriented solution would be a significantly heftier radial or axial-radial exhaust fan.
The cheap ones will howl like a lycanthrope at full moon and will drive You and others living near by nuts, so try-before-you-buy is strongly encouraged.
The dB figures that the marketing departments come up with for the budget fans are hopeful at best, downright lies at worst.
The better ones will set You back significantly more, especially if there’s highly recommended speed control, but the age old wisdom of “buy once cry once” applies, it is extremely hard to break or wear one out.
Most are designed and manufactured to run 24/7/365 for years with minimal or even no maintenance.
If the enclosure is airtight, that heftier exhaust fan can be assisted with a supply air fan to the enclosure, and if a active carbon filter is installed on the supply, also the blowback of fumes/odors is greatly reduced.
Other solution (that I will try at some point for different goals than odor control) might be to make an exhaust nozzle with brush end onto the laser head, but that’s rather difficult to pull of in a way that doesn’t restrict the movement of the head while still maintaining an adequate air flow.
Unfortunately there’s a catch when increasing any exhaust air volume -for whatever reason- in housing.
While slight under pressure is beneficial to the structures, the pressure will always equalize one way or another.
That always means disturbing the forced ventilation exhaust (if any), and in the gravity assisted systems the airflow reverses in chimneys, flues, etc. if the air has no other and easier way to enter the system.
Contrary to common belief, the added exhaust flow doesn’t have to be that significant either, air moves and the pressure equalizes very easily if the pressure environment changes.
Regards,
Sam
Thank you very much for the thoughtful and exhaustive reply. Yeah I am certainly going to have to do something else as what I have right now is not cutting it.
This is just part of the game with these things… one of the issues, when you have a vacuum system, they seem to be quite noisy…
I use the AC-Infinity series for greenhouses, which is much more quiet … could use more ventilation when doing heavy engraving on steel, creates lots of debris/odor. It’s mounted to the cutout that goes into my window…
Let us know what you come up with…
I ended up getting just the Ortur smoke purifier because I needed to get a job done soon and it seemed like the easiest solution for where my laser is (it was also on sale), and with the enclosure closed it has really reduced the smell. I also recently purchased a fan to go into the window so I can more easily circulate air by my laser.
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