Four materials, each exactly where it belongs.
The material sets the stiffness of every part, hence its eigenfrequencies, hence the noise: too soft, it deforms and closes the blade-housing clearance; too brittle, it will not survive the first fall. Over twenty candidates go through the bench — bending, tensile, Young's modulus, Charpy impact — and fall one by one: nylon drinks moisture, PPS is brittle under everyday knocks, plain PLA and PETG lack everything.
Four materials remain. Carbon-fiber-filled PETG makes the whole structure — housing, base, yoke, nose cone, knob. TPU 95A only makes the anti-vibration gasket: there, energy has to be absorbed rather than transmitted. Polycarbonate, only the base cover, whose snap-fit has to flex without breaking. And the impeller is printed in resin, by SLA rather than FDM, for its precision and surface finish.
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01PETG-CF: the structure
The housing, the base, the yoke — arm and mast —, the hub nose cone and the control knob are printed in carbon-fiber-filled PETG. It is the product's default material: anything that carries a load, holds a dimension or acts as a mechanical reference is made of it.
The carbon fiber gives it one of the best stiffness moduli of the comparison, and that is the decisive criterion here: the slightest micro-deformation of a load-bearing part becomes a parasitic noise source that is impossible to diagnose afterwards. It prints in FDM without a heated chamber or warping, with excellent repeatability from part to part. Its downside is known and accepted: it is abrasive, and demands a hardened nozzle.
02TPU 95A: the anti-vibration gasket
A single part is made of TPU 95A: the anti-vibration gasket, at the interface between the motor and the structure. That is the compulsory path for the motor's vibration energy — breaking it there is enough to keep that energy away from the housing, the base and the desk.
This thermoplastic elastomer converts that energy into heat instead of passing it on: a viscoelastic damping capacity with no equal among common printing materials. The Shore 95A hardness is deliberate — soft enough to damp the motor's switching harmonics, firm enough not to sag under the weight of the structure or lose its interface geometry over time.
03PC: the base cover
The cover that closes the base is the only polycarbonate part. It is not screwed on: it clips. Its snap-fit has to flex every time the base is opened — access to the electronics, the wiring, the connectors — and then return exactly to shape, dozens of times over.
That is precisely what PETG-CF cannot do: stiff and fiber-filled, it snaps rather than flexes. PC, by contrast, combines high mechanical strength with the toughness that lets it deform elastically without initiating a crack. A clip is not about stiffness: it is about flexibility that springs back.
04SLA resin: the impeller
The impeller is the only part that does not come off a filament printer. Every other part is produced in FDM, by fused deposition; the impeller is printed in resin, by stereolithography (SLA).
There are two reasons. Dimensional precision first: the clearance between the blades and the housing is the single most critical parameter for silence, and SLA holds tolerances no fused deposition can reach — the blades are also rigorously identical to one another, so the impeller balances without added weights. Surface finish second: an FDM blade is ridged by its layers, but above all scarred by its supports — every blade is built on scaffolding, and tearing it off leaves marks right on the working surface. SLA needs supports too, but its marks are fine enough to disappear under post-processing. Resin comes out smooth, and the air glides.