alt.hn

4/27/2026 at 9:35:07 PM

Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans

 https://www.noctua.at/en/3d-cad-models

by embedding-shape

4/30/2026 at 7:08:17 AM

There is Fan Show Down on yt where people are trying to beat the original Noctua fan design:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHLn2U7i45M_EXIsnqUyI...

by srott

4/30/2026 at 10:23:54 AM

I'm disappointed that this is on YT, shouldn't it be on OnlyFans?

by zozbot234

4/30/2026 at 2:09:33 PM

Since this has turned into a "giggle about fans" thread, one of my favorite company names is Big Ass Fans [1]. They make really large fans for warehouses, etc. And their logo is a donkey.

1: https://bigassfans.com/company/about-us/

by atonse

4/30/2026 at 4:21:16 PM

I have split feelings on Big Ass Fans.

I got three of their house fans from Costco a few years ago. Great fans - low power draw, good looks, includes a nice light, good noise profile, etc.

The fans didn't include wall panels, which I wanted rather than only remotes. No problem, I figured I'll order 3 of them from their site. However, there's an obvious bug in the shipping calculator, where the cost to ship three little wall boxes came out to $40+$40+$40 = $120. (And where the shipping page called this a "flat rate".) If I wanted to order 50 wall boxes, the shipping would be $2,000! The shipping cost was completely incongruent with other items in their shop - e.g. I could order 100 branded mugs for a flat shipping charge of $40. (And this is on top of the wall controllers that where already $123 each for some pretty simple electronics.)

I had probably a dozen support interactions over a couple weeks over both phone and email trying to get Big Ass Fans to fix their broken website and/or just put the wall controllers in a $30 flat-rate shipping box for me before we finally settled on a $55 shipping charge where I still felt like I was getting ripped off.

by Marsymars

4/30/2026 at 3:58:35 PM

It’s not just a donkey, it’s a donkeys ass.

by cjbgkagh

4/30/2026 at 2:53:51 PM

Always glad to see them mentioned! I drive by their factory all the time.

by malfist

4/30/2026 at 8:58:51 PM

we have a really large version, in our factory for 20+ years - its a game changer for the folks who do the real work around here.

by redorb

4/30/2026 at 10:31:36 AM

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't particularly precious about documentary-style fact reporting, you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction.

by stavros

4/30/2026 at 10:54:01 AM

I think the joke blew right past you.

by cheschire

4/30/2026 at 12:21:39 PM

> in addition to fan-related content only.

> you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction.

by Nevermark

4/30/2026 at 3:25:11 PM

> blew right past you.

This thread is a train wreck

by nothrabannosir

4/30/2026 at 6:49:40 PM

Not a blowout?

by wfleming

5/1/2026 at 3:34:04 AM

I just quoted two jokes! You cannot in any reasonably way infer I missed anything. Maybe I just do that!

by Nevermark

4/30/2026 at 10:58:17 AM

Alas, I'm afraid that was you.

by stavros

4/30/2026 at 8:51:32 PM

What with so many fans, it shouldn't be too surprising that jokes are just blowing every which way.

by tesseract

4/30/2026 at 11:02:43 AM

You seem a bit stuffy. Might need to cool off.

by cheschire

4/30/2026 at 11:50:38 AM

Noctua makes fans.

OnlyFans…

Get it?

by stingraycharles

4/30/2026 at 12:02:43 PM

The joke is that OnlyFans was for fans but was taken over by humans. Now it's not funny because I've had to explain it.

by Eldt

4/30/2026 at 12:21:50 PM

I'm sorry :/ I even included the r/fanfiction at the end, but that was also apparently too obscure.

by stavros

4/30/2026 at 12:39:05 PM

I think there were plenty of signs for the reader. My pet theory is that overly verbose llms have trained people to skim text instead of reading it. I've certainly noticed more cases than usual of people not reading HN comments thoroughly enough in the last six months

by wongarsu

4/30/2026 at 12:35:25 PM

I’m sorry too. my stupid jokes in response to yours earlier were just me taking advantage of bad fan puns but others seem to have jumped on the downvote bandwagon.

by cheschire

4/30/2026 at 2:10:33 PM

Daaamn I missed that, though it only worked on one level, as it hadn't blown past me!

by stavros

4/30/2026 at 2:11:38 PM

My “cool off” comment was a bad pun too

by cheschire

4/30/2026 at 10:53:10 AM

haha true, though I don't think that's what GP meant

by DaSHacka

4/30/2026 at 11:05:08 AM

> you're much better off browsing r/fanfiction.

The punchline is buried a little bit too deep, but pretty sure they're just playing along.

by pdpi

4/30/2026 at 11:15:00 AM

I thought "when they made the decision to include human adult content in addition to fan-related content" in the first sentence was already pretty obvious

by wongarsu

4/30/2026 at 4:28:30 AM

> 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't they just 3D scan?

by egeozcan

4/30/2026 at 5:40:30 AM

Unless they still have an unexpired patent on the design, it'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.

by userbinator

4/30/2026 at 8:48:30 AM

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.

by jijijijij

4/30/2026 at 10:41:38 AM

> The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

Well, in terms of its design, the patent system was designed to reward what we now call theft of IP, by granting someone exclusive use of a technology that they would bring in from another country. Greenfield invention was an afterthought and some of the problems we face stem from that disconnect.

by bandrami

4/30/2026 at 1:58:15 PM

Design by whom? The origin of patent law is older than most nations and constitutions. There have been various variations, reiterations and stated intentions. There is also no such thing as a natural intellectual property and the very legal concept is based on ideas like patent law. And of course, laws only apply to the people governed by them. Bad premises aside, back then, ripping off other peoples was a costly endeavor akin to research investment. And given the importance of the emerging patent system in the industrial revolution, I think your claims are a bit far fetched.

by jijijijij

4/30/2026 at 9:18:05 AM

You correct, you are allowed to "break" patent law in Germany, if the use is private and non-commercial. This does not encompass schools and science though.

by V__

4/30/2026 at 12:47:52 PM

Research is permitted, if the protected invention is commercially available, as far as I know. E.g. medical research. I believe, this means use for research cannot be restricted once commercially available. I am not sure, if it's limited to medicine in Germany. The US has similar exceptions for medical research AFAIK.

Sadly there is indeed no blanket permission for public research and education in Germany, either. There is little point mentioning it, but HN rate-limited my account, so I couldn't edit or comment to clarify in time.

I am not advocating for the German patent system, I just think the US is particularly ridiculous prohibiting personal reproduction and use. Like, you got a lathe, lab, computer or 3D printer and are literally prohibited to use it as you please, not allowed create certain mechanisms, substances, shapes and functions, for your own use, or even survival, without (possibly) harming anyone else.

by jijijijij

4/30/2026 at 3:57:20 PM

The legalese about not making a patented item for personal use is basically a technicality. From what I recall I think it might be limited more to process than physical devices, too.

No individuals gets prosecuted for it. The companies would spend more on lawyers than they could possibly collect.

by Aurornis

4/30/2026 at 3:07:18 PM

> At least in Germany, you are legally allowed to make patented things for yourself or science to some capacity.

Yeah, it has always amazed me that Ruf could market their own versions of the 911 without there being a design patent legal problem.

by adolph

4/30/2026 at 5:54:31 PM

I'm not familiar with Ruf beyond their inclusion in the Gran Turismo series, but are they actually distinct replicas of 911s, or are they purchased 911s (or sub-assemblies) that are have aftermarket parts swapped, like Shelby-editions of Ford vehicles? Because if its the latter, then it's still a Porsche 911, just with Ruf branded parts attached.

by dessimus

4/30/2026 at 8:56:20 AM 

  The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.
Is it, though? It seems like the purpose of a patent is pretty direct: make money for people(/corporations...) who invent things.

I guess you could argue that inventors would hide their designs without patents, but that's not how any industry I'm familiar with works; if they thought that obscurity was an option, they'd stick with it and just label it a trade secret!

by bbor

4/30/2026 at 9:44:23 AM

Yes, that is the purpose. It incentives R&D by providing a sanctioned monopoly on the result. The trade in return is that the public domain gets access to the trade secret after enough time has passed to provide the inventor with reward for their investment risk.

The problem is the time has been repeatedly extended across the world to the point that society gets very little from this arrangement.

At this point we're better off removing the concept of IP entirely.

by bfivyvysj

4/30/2026 at 9:46:35 AM

The original idea was "we protect the invention so the companies have guarantee that their investment in the innovation pays off".

The assumption was the invention was something rare and hard, not something you could re-recrate from scratch in a week or evening (in case of software invention) or that patent is only filled to cast a wide net to block the competition

by PunchyHamster

4/30/2026 at 9:47:56 AM

> It offers a bargain between society and inventor:for a limited period of exclusivity, the inventor agrees to make the invention public rather than to keep it secret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent

In today's world patents are mostly dysfunctional, or straight malignant. They tend to slow, discourage progress and selectively aid large corporation who can afford the legal warfare. They have become also less informative, more vague, so really the bargain with the collective is off now.

by jijijijij

4/30/2026 at 12:53:47 PM

Modern patent law came from 15th century Venice, where in the 13th century the glassmaker’s guild took trade secrecy so seriously that they decided that any glassworker who left the city without permission was to be hunted down and killed if imprisoning their family didn’t convince them to return.

by thfuran

4/30/2026 at 9:13:38 AM

Obscurity makes no sense on a world with patents.

by 0-_-0

4/30/2026 at 10:03:34 AM

Obscurity is otherwise known as "trade secret". It's used when the company really doesn't want to give anyone even a hint of what and how it's doing things, maybe going as far as assuming nobody can figure out the process independently either, so filing for a patent is out of the question. The Coca Cola formulation is a famous example.

by close04

4/30/2026 at 9:25:44 AM

Unless you don’t think anyone will ever figure out how you do something.

by teaearlgraycold

4/30/2026 at 9:24:37 AM

Uh no you can definitely make a replica of a patented device at home in the US. You can not sell it. I don’t think you could distribute the files of a reverse engineered Noctua fan online either.

by teaearlgraycold

4/30/2026 at 10:11:59 AM

Correct me, if I am wrong:

> Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/271

There seems to be no exception for personal use. A quick search shows apparent patent lawyers claiming personal use/manufacturing not to be permitted, either (I won't link it here, since it may or may not be SEO/AI spam). If I understand correctly, this is also evident by legal precedent regarding rights to repair (valid defense).

De facto it may be usually without consequences, since patent violations need to be called out by the offended party. If the patent holder is oblivious, nothing will happen. And since personal reproduction is likely not causing financial damages, you are likely only gonna be told to stop, I presume.

But it's still infringement and consequently you may get away with reproduction, but cannot talk about it.

Honestly, I couldn't believe it at first either. It seems wildly overstepping into personal freedom what you are allowed to make with your own hands for yourself. Especially since patents are now granted liberally for stuff borderline trivial, or not actually innovative, lacking thorough research.

by jijijijij

4/30/2026 at 10:22:03 AM

Hmm, I recall asking my father this but he’s a criminal lawyer not a patent lawyer.

by teaearlgraycold

5/1/2026 at 2:10:35 AM

I don’t think you could distribute the files of a reverse engineered Noctua fan online either.

That is also legal, and if anything you'd own the copyright to those files.

by userbinator

4/30/2026 at 8:07:55 AM

just make sure there aren't any rounded corners

by taskforcegemini

4/30/2026 at 8:36:44 AM

But can I clone my lover?

by unixhero

4/30/2026 at 6:27:01 AM

Unless they have patents on their fan impleller geomeries, the IP they'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't have any experience there to draw on.

by kelnos

4/30/2026 at 4:44:56 AM

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.

by fecal_henge

4/30/2026 at 4:54:36 AM

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's these (perhaps small) optimizations that justify Noctua being 5x more expensive than generic black fan.

by quanto

4/30/2026 at 5:23:55 AM

I believe the tolerances to the fan housing (which reduces turbulence and thus noise), and the the material stiffness needed for that small tolerance, are the alleged reason there are few copycats. Supposedly getting plastic that rigid is hard. I've tried to find hard numbers and validate that claim, but I wasn't able to. Would probably have to measure an actual noctua fan blade to know. On the other hand, metal printing is attainable now..

by fyrn_

4/30/2026 at 6:46:04 AM

While metal printing is attainable..it generally produce shit, surface quality wise. You still need to CNC that if you want a surface roughness not measured in mm

And is not like a 5axis could not produce these fan geometries from a block

by Iulioh

4/30/2026 at 6:31:03 AM

Do they add glass fibers, I wonder. That's a way to make plastic stiffer but it's a bit harder to make.

by HPsquared

4/30/2026 at 11:03:26 AM

They definitely add something. Noctua has a different texture and grain.

by throwaway85825

4/30/2026 at 9:32:38 AM

Hopefully not - I’d hate the idea of my fan shedding glass fibers right into the exhaust of my PC and onwards into my office.

by alex43578

4/30/2026 at 5:44:17 PM

Shedding is not a significant concern. You almost certainly use glass fiber reinforced plastics in products like your car and power tools.

by AlotOfReading

4/30/2026 at 3:58:43 PM

> Its hard to believe they have some miraculous geometry that needs guarding anyway.

They do. Their products are an example of a company refining a concept to an extreme degree to squeeze out as much performance as possible.

by Aurornis

5/1/2026 at 12:40:28 AM

I see a parallel with secrecy behind submarine propeller design -- quieter, more efficient fan/prop designs are a competitive advantage

by ImPostingOnHN

4/30/2026 at 4:43:00 AM

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.

by zbrozek

4/30/2026 at 7:09:56 AM

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.

by ForOldHack

4/30/2026 at 12:57:22 PM

It better have been, considering what they charge and how long they take to come out with new ones.

by thfuran

4/30/2026 at 4:58:22 AM

Yes, by no means did I comment to take away from the great service they are doing to the builders. I'm a Noctua fan!

I was just curious.

by egeozcan

4/30/2026 at 5:37:40 AM

> I'm a Noctua fan!

:)

by dcminter

4/30/2026 at 9:00:36 AM

You may find it hard to believe, but I honestly didn't realize this as I was typing :)

by egeozcan

5/2/2026 at 3:37:59 PM

I hoped as much! Delightful.

by dcminter

4/30/2026 at 7:22:19 AM

Must be a really quiet guy.

by layer8

4/30/2026 at 11:12:39 AM

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

by dgellow

4/30/2026 at 3:45:03 PM

And how do you now how accurate that is? If you did it based on photos, I seriously doubt that the model is accurate to millimeters at every point of the surface.

by echoangle

4/30/2026 at 2:10:25 PM

A copy-of-a-copy can lose a lot of detail. If you're good, people are going to clone you, but you might as well not do their work for them and filter out at least the lowest effort clones. Given the profit margins of a lot of these things the effort and skill required could make the whole cloning venture not worth it.

by colechristensen

4/30/2026 at 9:39:13 AM

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.

by numpad0

4/30/2026 at 8:42:58 AM

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.

by nkrisc

4/30/2026 at 9:19:21 AM

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

by Koffiepoeder

5/1/2026 at 1:33:43 AM

Why not scan the original fan Noctua ripped off then? Nidec Servo Gentle Typhoon

by rasz

5/1/2026 at 2:14:35 AM

I have one of those and can attest to its quietness, as well as reliability --- it's almost 2 decades old and still working well with no sound, just needs an occasional cleaning. Takes almost 30 seconds to coast to a stop!

by userbinator

4/30/2026 at 4:47:03 PM

so it's pretty useless if they just say it's their design, but not really.

by m3kw9

4/30/2026 at 5:55:20 AM

Wouldn't there be too much error when you both 3D scan and 3D print it?

by whazor

4/30/2026 at 11:14:03 AM

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline

by dgellow

4/30/2026 at 7:11:45 AM

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.

by ForOldHack

4/30/2026 at 9:49:06 AM

you'd probably have to do a bit of fixing on a model to get close

by PunchyHamster

4/30/2026 at 5:31:33 AM

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.

by kernalix7

4/30/2026 at 5:43:28 AM

Aren't their dimensions standard? Many people replace other fans with Noctua's, after all.

by userbinator

4/30/2026 at 5:55:22 AM

The fan body itself follows standard 120/140mm dimensions, but I needed the smaller details for my design, the rubber dampers, anti-vibration corners, cable routing clips. Those don't show up cleanly in the datasheet, so I ended up using a caliper. That's the part the official CAD would have helped most with.

by kernalix7

4/30/2026 at 10:43:23 AM

You're better off for having done the measurements.

Broadly, it is just good training since you're normally _not_ going to have CAD drawings. If you do this enough, it becomes second nature, and with a 3D printer it's fast to make test prints which you can use to check your measurements against.

More specifically, it avoids having to wonder if you'd be breaching some law by using those CAD drawings to make a "derivative work". While there's nothing illegal about using precise tools to measure an existing product and create a CAD model. It's (apparently) a silly grey area to take measurements from a CAD representation of a product to make your own CAD model. It can be argued that you're just taking factual information from a reference and using it to produce your own design. But whenever you find yourself saying to yourself that something "can be argued" then you really need to take pause to consider if you want to find that out for yourself or avoid the problem entirely.

This is the same absurd nonsense that Prusa's "Open" Community License imposes. If I buy a Prusa 3D printer and I just carefully measure it (I don't find this that hard, and I am at best an amateur, consider what an experienced CAD designer could achieve with the right tools), I can create a 3D model of the printer and, as long as I've omitted any separable purely aesthetic elements, I own all rights to that 3D model.

Moreover, as long as there are no patents on the product, I can manufacture and sell it.

The hard part of cloning a product like a 3D printer or silent fan is not in getting the exact CAD model, it's in the choice and sourcing of materials, making the right tooling, finding places to make all the parts, etc.

There are also some secrets on how certain things are manufactured. But those either don't appear in the CAD model or can be easily omitted.

If manufacturers want to hand out CAD models of their products, they should do so under some highly permissive license, with only enough detail to actually aid in producing mods. The alternative where the license is restrictive, is that you're just giving out poisoned apples that solely restrict the freedoms of anyone who decides to take them.

by Arch-TK

4/30/2026 at 7:31:14 AM

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!

by ikornaselur

4/30/2026 at 10:50:20 AM

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't doable for a criminal. But in reality it's because ownership of production and machines is about to get banned for the lower classes.

by emsign

4/30/2026 at 11:00:40 AM

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

by throwaway85825

4/30/2026 at 11:02:27 PM

You will not be able to make anything and you will be happy.

by HDBaseT

4/30/2026 at 4:20:28 PM

recent scotus decision will make that much harder (not that lawmakers respect judicial decisions. but most firearm bills are overturned anyway).

by richwater

4/30/2026 at 6:08:59 AM

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't seem to move much air. I'm planning to replace them with Noctua fans.

by fy20

4/30/2026 at 7:33:07 AM

Probably best to look up the local prices yourself? We don'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.

by Mashimo

4/30/2026 at 10:59:36 AM

You'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.

by throwaway85825

4/30/2026 at 8:08:44 AM

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.

by KeplerBoy

4/30/2026 at 7:10:43 AM

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

by swiftcoder

4/30/2026 at 9:28:21 AM

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

by russelg

4/30/2026 at 5:44:37 AM

Mikrotik does this for some of their parts as well

by jasiek

4/30/2026 at 6:02:31 AM

Good to know, didn't realize Mikrotik did this too. Useful for homelab planning where rack space and airflow actually matter.

by kernalix7

4/30/2026 at 11:10:16 AM

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

by dgellow

4/30/2026 at 4:39:57 PM

Noctua stays winning

by mghackerlady

4/30/2026 at 9:36:05 AM

"Vercel Security Checkpoint"

"enable javascript to continue"

Bugger...

by sylware

4/30/2026 at 8:58:55 AM

only fans?

by caldis_chen

4/30/2026 at 8:03:45 AM

repost??

by pylotlight

4/30/2026 at 3:00:55 PM

[dead]

by Michael666