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Step 4Heating element
Don't forget the heating element. When making the long lengths of straight wire, crimp out the curves and make sure you don't have any sharp bends. Current does not like turning sharp corners.
OVERVIEW: I found two fans had worn bearings and one was just fine. I had two broken heating elements and some ceramic insulating disks and tubing. There really is not much to these babies at all...makes me wonder why they are so expensive. All they are is a heating element and a motor. A bridge rectifier stood between AC mains voltage and the air blower motor. This was encouraging as I wanted to run my power supply for the idea in my head from low DC voltage. I don't like playing with mains 240 volts AC. The motors were rated to 17volts DC. That is close enough to my desired 12volts DC. I powered my chosen fan that didn't have rattling bearing and it worked. Kewl.
I also saw that one of the guns had hollow cylinders of ceramic that were used to hold the heating elements. I inserted one of the cylinders into my soldering iron metal tube. It fit perfectly. That was very encouraging too. I still had no idea as to what the final idea would be like. Be adaptive and use what is available is my motto. I had earlier pulled my dead soldering iron apart too to see how it worked and if I could fix it. It's element was stuffed. I also noticed that it relied on conductive heating to heat the tip. My concept from the beginning was to pass cold air through the hollow barrel, expose it to a heating element and have hot air forced out of the tip. Much like a mini hot air paint stripper. This concept never changed, but the ideas as to how I reached this end were constantly changing, as I engineered numerous new ideas with what I had available in front of me on my work bench.
OVERVIEW: I found two fans had worn bearings and one was just fine. I had two broken heating elements and some ceramic insulating disks and tubing. There really is not much to these babies at all...makes me wonder why they are so expensive. All they are is a heating element and a motor. A bridge rectifier stood between AC mains voltage and the air blower motor. This was encouraging as I wanted to run my power supply for the idea in my head from low DC voltage. I don't like playing with mains 240 volts AC. The motors were rated to 17volts DC. That is close enough to my desired 12volts DC. I powered my chosen fan that didn't have rattling bearing and it worked. Kewl.
I also saw that one of the guns had hollow cylinders of ceramic that were used to hold the heating elements. I inserted one of the cylinders into my soldering iron metal tube. It fit perfectly. That was very encouraging too. I still had no idea as to what the final idea would be like. Be adaptive and use what is available is my motto. I had earlier pulled my dead soldering iron apart too to see how it worked and if I could fix it. It's element was stuffed. I also noticed that it relied on conductive heating to heat the tip. My concept from the beginning was to pass cold air through the hollow barrel, expose it to a heating element and have hot air forced out of the tip. Much like a mini hot air paint stripper. This concept never changed, but the ideas as to how I reached this end were constantly changing, as I engineered numerous new ideas with what I had available in front of me on my work bench.
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Dec 23, 2008. 10:37 PM0_Nvd_0
says:
Current does not like turning sharp corners? Just joking or what?
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Sep 23, 2009. 3:01 PMeh9
says:
Resistance wire can be brittle, leading to element failure at sharp bends.
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Sep 23, 2009. 3:15 PM0_Nvd_0
says:
Yes but I think the wire is at its place. No one is moving it. How will it break?
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Sep 23, 2009. 4:13 PMeh9
says:
Thermal cycling, which makes everything move.
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