By: Dave (Zwolf) Joyslin 5/21/2002

In our first article we showed you how to put a blowhole in your case. Then we showed you how to cleanup the interior of your case and improve its airflow by using looming and rounded cables in our second article. So what's next? We have decided to look into something a lot of folks wonder about. "What is a tailless fan?" We are also looking to answer a few of the other questions asked about these whirling beauties like … "What do I do with a tailless fan? How do I hook up a tailless fan? Will a tailless fan monitor RPM's?" The answers to these questions are fairly simple and we are going to walk you through this process step by step.

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First and foremost, a tailless, or non-tailed fan is simply a fan that has bare power and monitoring leads. Resellers make these fans available for a number of reasons. For one, they're easier to buy in quantity or they just come that way depending on brand or type. Also, many customers cut the connectors off and modify them anyway. Another reason is that motherboard fan headers are not designed to handle the large amounts of power required to drive some HO fans currently on the market. So, by producing tailless fans the manufacturers are simply offering you a choice. You can certainly buy pre-tailed fans in several configurations. With a standard connector for a three pin fan header on a motherboard, a four pin Molex type connector to connect directly to your power supply, and there are adaptors that will let you do both to allow for monitoring of the fan. But we're going to do it the old fashioned way, we're going to do it ourselves!

First thing we need of course is a fan. In this case, it's a 80mm Delta fan. Here we can see that I've already divided the wires and used heat shrink tubing on the two power leads. Using heat shrink tubing is entirely optional, but I find that it makes for a cleaner finished product. I'm not going to show you how to use heat shrink tubing…but just for reference, you slip the tubing over the wire leads and heat it with a hand held hair dryer or similar and the tubing shrinks around the wire. When doing this make sure to leave enough of the wire leads hanging out the end of the tubing. About 2 inches should give you enough to work with. Pictured below are the parts you'll need to accomplish our easy fan modification.

• 1 Male Molex nylon shell four pin connector
• 2 Male pins for Male Molex connector
• 1 three pin terminal housing (3 Pin fan to motherboard connector)
• 1 insert for terminal housing
• 1 Piece of heat shrink tubing (optional)

The other things you'll need to have on hand are a wire stripper and a pair of needle nose pliers. If you have a combination wire stripper/crimping tool, that will work just as well. If you don't happen to have any of these, then a plain old pocketknife and pliers will do the job. Just be careful and don't cut any body parts off!!!

The power feed for these fans are the Black and Red wires. We start by stripping off approximately one inch of insulation from the end of our power wires. This will leave you with about one inch of insulated wire between where we are going to install the pins and the start of the heatsink tubing.

Next thing we're going to do is get the stripped end of the leads ready to be fitted with the male pins that fit inside the Molex connector. Since most of the twelve-volt power leads for fans are in the twenty-four-gauge range, I've stripped off about twice the insulation we'll need to fit inside the male pins. The reason for doing this is so that we can fold the wire back against itself and twist it together in order to make it thicker. This way when we insert it into the male pin it will fill the inside of the pin and allow a good solid connection with the metal. This tighter fit will allow us to crimp the tabs that hold the pin onto the wire without letting the wire slip around in the pin.

Now with the wire folded back onto itself, slide the male pin onto the bare wire until it fits firmly into the pin.

At this point you will have all the bare wire inserted into the male pin and the pin clamps are now cradling the insulation of the wire. Now we'll just crimp over the tabs onto the insulation with our trusty needle nose pliers. Once again, if you do not have needle nose pliers, a pair of regular pliers or combination wire stripper/crimping tool will work as well.

Just repeat the above procedure with the second power lead and we're ready to seat them into the connector.

With our power pins securely in place simply insert the pins through the rear of the plastic Molex shell into the appropriate holes. The power lead will be in the pin one position while the ground for the fan goes into the pin two position. Check closely as most connectors are numbered to help make the job easier. If your connector isn't numbered simply hold the connector facing you with the tapered edges up. The twelve-volt lead from the fan goes to the right outside hole in the connector. The ground goes to the hole to the left of the power pin. If you still are not sure, look at the female connectors from your power supply and make sure that when you mate the two connectors that the fans RED power lead mates to the PSU's YELLOW power lead. Also the BLACK fan ground lead will mate to the BLACK PSU ground lead.

Once the pins are inserted they lock into place. Again make sure that you have the correct wire going into the correct pinhole of the connector.

If all you wanted to do was power a case or heat sink fan directly from your power supply, you could stop right here you would be done! But what about the other fan lead we have? This lead allows us to monitor the RPM's of the fan. For us to utilize this feature we have a few more steps and then we will be able to see how fast our fan is running.

This lead will be Blue or Yellow depending on the type of fan you have. We will need to use a three-pin Molex terminal housing to complete our pin out. Most resellers refer to these as three pin fan connectors, these are the type of connectors that fit onto the fan header of your motherboard like the type that come with fans that are already tailed and ready to plug onto the motherboard fan header. You'll also need one insert for the housing.

Our first step is to strip the wire back about one quarter of an inch, or just enough so the bare wire does not extend past the end of the insert.

Next, place the wire into the insert and pinch down the tabs of the insert to hold the wire in place.

Now that we have the pin securely attached to the wire, simply push the insert into the correct hole in the terminal housing and it will lock in place. The insert can only be installed into the connector body one way, so that the flat part of the insert can be seen through the slots on the side of the housing. Once again, proper pin orientation is critical. Notice the two tabs on the body of the housing, the lead must be inserted into the hole on the far right, while the tabs are facing up and the front of the housing is facing you.

Here's the finished product, and a picture of how the fan power connector should look when attached to a female power lead from your power supply.

Now to utilize this fan mount in place like you normally would. Connect the power lead to the PSU supply lead. Now take the monitor lead and attach to a fan header located on the motherboard. When you restart your system you will be able to go into the bios and check out your handy work in the Hardware monitor section. You should see the current RPM's your fan is running at. Once in Windows there are several utilities that will allow you to keep track of your system including fans. Several manufacturers produce their own utilities you can install to handle this. If your motherboard doesn't have such a utility you can use MotherBoard Monitor to make sure your baby is running cool and comfortable.

As you have seen this project isn't that bad to handle. The ability to pin out your own fans gives you the flexibility to customize each of your fan installations. Many of the fans we buy have feed wires that are to long and hang in the case. Now you can shorten these leads to help clean up the case internal appearance even more. You may have been wondering why I keep talking about cleaning up the internal case appearance. In our next article we will be taking a look at modifying a case for a window. We put so much cool stuff into our rigs why not show it off. I can't think of a better way to do that then by putting a window in the side of the case. In our next case modification article that's exactly what we are going to do. We're going to show you how to put a window in your case.