Never give up on your dreams, even if it turns into a giant fireball

Never give up on your dreams, even if it turns into a giant fireball

Following my previous post about speaking to your younger self about what you have achieved, yesterday evening presented one of those opportunities to create something which could fly, originally the idea was to create a Chinese lantern with crate paper and a wax soaked rag, but this was deemed too weak and if we were going to do something like that, we would have to… Make it more interesting shall we say.

Previously Dan and I had played with PC Fans and volt steppers and made some “super cool” USB Powered desk fans which now sit beautifully on Dans desk ready to keep him cool when playing Battle Royal Games; however, this time, we wanted to use the same desk fan idea but create a fire tornado as a method of propulsion [If you haven’t seen a fire tornado I would highly recommend you check it out] – The concept behind it, you have a fuel source which is ignited and the open top container is rotated which swirls the flame making it bigger, this was going to be an integral part of making our flying machine – We had it all planned in our heads, small dish attached to a PC fan powered by battery, with a switch, the PC fan would spin making the flame bigger, then we would measure the flame and create a structured balloon out of lightweight material for the hot air to fill – Easy right?

We made a list of things we would need and drove over to the town over to an Outdoors shop which had the Gel fuel we were after, the small tin we were after and some fishing wire so we could keep control of the balloon once it had taken off – Last thing we wanted was for our crazy invention to work too well and ignite somebody’s shed or pet – We also went to a super market and picked up a dirt cheap single bedsheet which we could cut out creating the balloon shape.

So, let us get to work shall we?
We already had a basic idea on how to make the fan spin as we had done it in a previous project – For those unaware, a PC Fan typically runs at 12 Volts, we soldered 2 9V Batteries together with joining cables across the terminals – 9 Volts was enough to spin the fan, just not at max speed which was okay, next, attach the switch then the switch and the batteries to the fan! Et Voila with a bit of hot glue we now had a Powered PC Fan with power and switch as one unit.
Next Step, attach the dish – After several test fits, we couldn’t get the dish centred and after a small test run, we ran into a problem…. The hot glue… The dish was getting so hot it was melting the glue causing the dish on the rotating fan to slip, the moment we saw it happening, switch went straight off, okay, we need to keep the dish in the middle and glue just isn’t good enough – Dan went out to his van, his idea was to drill a hole in the dish and a tiny bit into the fan to hold the unit together – a few minutes past and he walked back in dropping the unit on the table going, well, I broke it… Never the matter, new fan, wire work done again, hot glue where hot glue would work, this time we used glue and solder to hold the dish on which was very promising. We were confident now that this would work, so outside we went, filled the dish and compacted it with tissue then soaked it in the fire gel, ignited the gel (So far so good) Flipped the switch on the fan and for a moment, we saw the potential flame grow, but alas, thanks to weather conditions, along with us just kind of winging it, we had too much down force, the flames were being sucked down by the fan instead of going upwards! – Rookie Mistake really, but for Version 1 not bad we know it worked, even if it worked… Backwards?

We let it burn for a bit to see if it would correct itself, but it didn’t the fan spun, the fire danced and lets say, I’m glad there was a switch on it, once the flames got a touch too close to the batteries we flipped the switch bringing the fan to a stop leaving the dish burning in a standard upwards direction.

I wouldn’t call that evenings experiment a complete failure, it was fun putting the idea to practice, it was fun hitting each phase, hooking up the power, aligning the dish, playing with fire, even though we didn’t get a flame tornado, we still got some awesome slow-mo footage of it which I have shared with my family which my sister instantly replied was it meant to set on fire? You can only laugh really, it was a fun experiment which had some unexpected results, we got to expand our soldering skills, come up with concepts, be inventors! I cannot wait to see what our next invention is! Hopefully it will either physically or metaphorically “Get off the ground”.