Well, me and a friend did the modding this afternoon/tonight, so I've got a lot of pictures, and for the most part I'll let them do the talking. However, I'll give some background. I work at a biofuels company, Biofuels Power Corporation, and we make biodiesel and then burn it in a Frame 5 turbine to produce energy which we sell to the local grid. Pretty cool. I got hired to do CAD work... which after about 4 months I'd finished all the stuff they'd wanted, but since I like the place and my friend still worked there I stayed and just did whatever was needed. I ended up makin' the company web page and doing a few more CAD projects... but there are also other division of the "parent" company-like-thing Texoga Technologies, like Armored Technologies... which has Leopard I tanks that are converted to fight fires. Really, when someone asks me what I do at work... I can't find a good answer these days. Long story short, its really hot here around Houston, like 100F+ no problem each day. Well, welding and fixin' stuff inside the turbine or around the biodiesel plant in that heat is... hot. So, one of the guys was talkin' to us sayin' how he wished these had a fan... and we figured, what the hell, that can't be too hard. So, one old welding mask later, we offered to give it a try and show him what we could do on the cheep. I'll let the pictures do most of the story. Needless to say, we tried a lot of tools to cut the plastic. Damn, that material was tough, but the garden sheers did fine. I woulda used the cut-off wheels... but my Dremel massive kit edition had plenttttty of cutoff wheels of all sorts, but no mandrel to hold them! Whats that dremel!??! My friend, Tyler, the guy helpin' me, grabbed some when he was out later. Yes, that is a K-Nex peice JB Welded on as a support... lol. Some cheep, $1.50 acrylic panel from lowe's that I picked up last week on the off chance that I'd need something like it. Well, turned out to be needed! Drilled a hole and added an on/off switch too. Well, this is the cut-out from earlier, and we need something to sheild the two 9V batteries from sparks... so... Ta-da! Electrical tape hinge too. And thats all there was too it. It ended up takin' a bit, and it stole a day from my work on the Mk IV... but oh well. Now no excuse to cut my motherboard IO panel! But we're quite happy with how it turned out. The duct is very solid and everything works fine. The airflow is actually quite pleasant. Constant, but not a hurricane of wind. All done.
Well, its been field tested and they claim it works great, so at least that goal was accomplished. The main thrust of this was to make this outa stuff we had laying around, not having to buy anything new. And, well, we did that too. So in all regards: a success. Now, at some point we'll probably make another... but nicer and with better fan placement.
Most of the welders I know wear bandannas under their helmets anyway, so this shouldn't be a problem. That's a cool idea. The guys I know would want heaters in theirs....
Props man, I know some welders that would like one of those. Think maybe you could tweak your design a little to your liking and produce them?
