Fume Extractor DIY

Hello everyone. By now you might have guessed I'm an electronics enthusiast and one of the major step in any prototyping is soldering. Although this is a very fast, cheap and reliable way of connecting the components to one another, this generates a lot of smoke. This smoke mainly comes form the flux in the solder. I personally ignored the smoke until now but I had faced some headaches and giddiness after prolonged sessions of soldering. So I promised myself to not to inhale this poison anymore and gifted myself with this fume extractor which works great.

I'd highly recommend this!!

Step 1: Gather Your Parts

I sourced my components form local hardware stores.

Pipe ~ 40cm around 8cm in diameter

Wood Sticks - ~60cm

Cardboard- 15cm X 30cm

PC fan (Heart of the project)

A power adapter

Some wood screws

And some generic stationary like a good glue and box cutters.

Step 2: Shaping Your Pipe

Have a look at you pc fan and look for some structural support in the fan. I found these supports which were perfect for supporting. Also make sure that the fan is well spaced from the pipe. Make sure that the fan doesn't touch the pipe. Mark the places where the supports touch and cut the markings. Once you've made sure that the cuts are okay and the fan rotates freely, add you favourite glue and fix it. Do not use super glue or crazy glue and they are very brittle once they dry and the vibrations may break it any time. Use some rubber based adhesive which can absorb the vibrations better.

As a support, add a stick of around 20cm and stick it permanently with some strong two component adhesive as this will be supporting our project. If you are a mechanical engineer, I can get a bit technical with you and there will be a significant bending moment acting on that point.

Be patient and let the glue dry thoroughly.

Step 3: Prepare Your Cardboard Part

Measure your fan's external diameter and use our classical mathematical formula Circumference = pi X diameter.

I approximated my diameter to 10 cm and this gave me a length of 31cm. I cut a cardboard piece of around 31X 15 cm and then made sure that the fan fits inside.

Fix every thing and then cut the cardboard as shown in my pictures. This is to make a proper seal with the pipe so that the air doesn't leak inside.

Add some sticky tape and seal it thoroughly.

Step 4: Add Electric Connections and the Supports.

The fan I used was a 12V PC fan. However I didn't have any 12V power adapter. But I had 5V mobile chargers in excess. So I grabbed a charger and a boost conveter, set it to 12V and Wolah the fan stared spinning. Yayyyyyyy

Then cut the wooden sticks with appropriate lengths and add some wood screws. But have one hole at a given joint bigger than the screw threads. So that the screw doesn't loosen when you open and close it.

Finally find some strong support to attach this project and you're done.

Step 5: The End Result

Here I have demonstrated the result with and without the fan. The first one is with the fan turned on. You can see that the stream of smoke is much smaller with indicates laminar flow due to suction created by the fan.

The next image is the one when the fan is not kept above. The smoke still rises upward due to convection (Smoke being lighter as compared to surrounding air).

At the end of the day, this is a project which I found to be really useful and effective...

As usual, happy DIY.................