Outroot and things

Electronics, programming, computers, and geek stuff by Kevin Darlington

Fume extrac­tor

Lately, I’ve been inhal­ing a lit­tle too much flux fumes so I decided that I needed a fume extrac­tor. I saw a lot of DIY fume extrac­tors on the web but I wasn’t sat­is­fied with the per­for­mance of those extrac­tors. A lot of the demon­stra­tions showed that you had to be within 2 inches of the fan in order for it to work properly.

My dad hap­pened to have an Attwood Turbo 4000 blower in his shop, and it seemed per­fect for this type of task. It already has the hous­ing for the fan and plenty of room for a fil­ter, switch, and power.

Parts

• 1x Attwood Turbo 4000 blower (or any other sim­i­lar 12v blower)
• 1x AC to DC adapter. 12v 3A+. I actu­ally used a 12v 800mA adapter and it seemed to work even though the motor is rated at 3.8A, but the adapter gets pretty hot.
• 1x DC jack. I used the panel mount type. You can option­ally just cut the wire and hook it up to the switch directly.
• 1x SPST switch. You can option­ally just plug the DC adapter directly to the motor.
• Cut­away car­bon fil­ter. I used Black Magic Cut-Your-Own Fil­ter. I bought mine from Pet-Supermarket, but I think Wal-Mart sells them.
• Scotch tape (or a bet­ter method of attach­ing the filter)

Assem­bly

This should really be self explana­tory, but below are the steps you can take to assem­ble the fume extractor.

Con­nect the DC and the motor to the switch. Don’t sol­der any­thing yet and make sure it all works. I used some shrink wrap to pre­vent the wires from touch­ing each other.

DC, switch, motor, wires

Time to cut out of fil­ter. One trick you can do is to press the blower hard onto the fil­ter to make an indent. Then use an x-acto knife to cut the fil­ter out as a cir­cle pat­tern that will insert nicely into the case. Note that the fan of the blower is very close to the edge of the case, and the fil­ter will touch the cen­ter of the fan. I didn’t notice the fan run­ning slower as a result of rub­bing on the fil­ter. I used scotch tape to hold the fil­ter in. There are bet­ter ways to keep the fil­ter in, but this was cheap and easy.

You can see in the pic­ture that the flux fumes have stuck to the car­bon filter.

Show­ing how the fil­ter is installed. Scotch tape!

Here is a pic­ture of the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of my par­tic­u­lar blower.

Blower spec­i­fi­ca­tions

Here is the fume extractor’s switch and DC parts hot glued to the bot­tom of the blower.

Hot glued switch and DC jack

The switch loca­tion would most likely be more acces­si­ble if it was point­ing towards the front or was on top.

Thoughts

• If you don’t want wires com­ing out of the fume extrac­tor, you can exper­i­ment with bat­ter­ies. Some­thing like a lap­top bat­tery should work.
• You could install the fil­ter on the other side and reverse the polar­ity of the DC. This would give you more room to install the fil­ter and attach it prop­erly. Just make sure that you make the fumes get sucked through the fil­ter first before it hits the fan as the fumes are cor­ro­sive (though, the degree of which is prob­a­bly ignorable).
• I sug­gest you put some kind of rub­ber or sil­i­con on the feet. This thing is pow­er­ful enough to make it move around!

Con­clu­sion

This thing really rocks. I can sol­der about 8 inches away and it’ll suck it up. It could prob­a­bly per­form much bet­ter if the fil­ter was thin­ner, or I had a DC adapter with a higher cur­rent rat­ing. The total cost of this project will most likely run you about $30-$45. Still cheaper than a lot of the com­mer­cial fume extrac­tors out there (not to men­tion the power).

Tags: extractor, fume, solder

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Electronics, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.