Printed turbine fan rotor made on a Core One

Nov 05, 2026 Last reply: 2 days ago 2 Replies
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The starting point here is a broken part: a leaf blower impeller that had come apart. Rather than just replacing it, the maker turned the failure into a Fusion practice project and modeled an intricate multi-bladed rotor from scratch. That seems like a great way to learn, since a turbine gives you curved surfaces and symmetry to wrestle with instead of a boring bracket.



The assembly itself is nicely layered. Curved outer blades wrap around a central ring, and angled support struts sit inside that ring. The nose cone is a separate piece from the rotor body. Everything was modeled in Fusion and printed on a Prusa Core One using Prusament PCblend-CF, pushed through E3D Diamondback nozzles. The printer lays down grey filament, and the footage of the print head building up the top of the central structure makes the layer lines look very even.



What stands out most to me is the geometry. The finished part reads as clean, with the blade curves and the inner struts all coming together without visible mess, and the maker sounds satisfied with how it turned out. Carbon fiber blends can be unforgiving on fine details like blade tips, so a clean result on a Core One with that filament is worth noting.



One thing left open is the nose cone. Since it is printed as a separate piece, how it attaches to the rotor is not shown, and that joint is the part I would be most curious about on a fan that actually has to spin. A separate cone is a reasonable trade-off for printability, but the connection method is the unanswered piece of this build for me.


The choice that catches my eye is pairing PCblend-CF with Diamondback nozzles. Fiber-filled filament chews through softer brass, so in my view a hardened nozzle is the smart call for long blade surfaces where any wear would show up as rough edges. The trade-off is cost, but for a rotor like this the surface finish looks like it paid off.

A variation worth trying: model the nose cone onto the rotor as one piece and print the whole thing with supports under the cone. It would remove the joining question entirely and keep everything aligned on the same axis. The risk is support scarring on the underside, though on a curved cone that area might be hidden well enough to be acceptable.

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