Wind tunnel out of a Leaf blower hack

thingiverse

So, I was challenged to find the air behind an object. Not that easy right? Well, here's the catch, I can only use what I can find in shop class. Luckily for me, there is a 3D printer, a leaf blower, some wood, spare VEX parts, and a digitizer there. All I needed now was a photogate! I'll explain more later on. But in short, what I am showing here is the adapter I made for the leaf blower to ensure equal fair flow across the wooden wind tunnel. In short, we have a 3-axis arm that has a digital switch (photogate) triggered when air flows, and when it goes from flowing air to non-flowing air it makes a point using the digitizer. ... After a while there isn't any more dead air space, and you have a 3D printable model of the air space behind the object. All for less than a spool of plastic, $30 leaf blower, $5 photogate, 3 motors, and a microscribe (note you could use encoders if you wanted to, but we had the microscribe and wanted to make our lives easy). Yeah I never got around to finishing this... Kinda graduated first and all of it was still in my high school. Print Settings Printer Brand: MakerBot Printer: MakerBot Replicator (5th Generation) Rafts: Yes Supports: No Resolution: 0.3 Infill: 10% Notes: Don't print the side view, that's in inches. Print the regular one. So with one shell, it took a mere 18 hours to print this beast with 250+ grams of plastic. This was with bumping up some extrude speeds too. I would not advise printing this unless you have a lot of time to let it do its thing. How I Designed This So I started off with this sketch. It allowed me to get a general idea of what shape it would be. (note the angled corners) The next step was to make the little clip that would secure it to the leaf blower (cutting extrusion, vertical extrude up, then some more extrudes and fillets to get the thing right) Then simply loft one square to the correlating square in sketch 10 (make sure the loft is a new solid so you can shell it) and repeat till all 16 lofts are done This is what 16 lofts done looks like then mirror solid the 16 new solid objects twice. (giving you all 4 quadrants filled based off of one quadrant of work) and combine everything back into one solid using the combine feature Then well, I did an extrude to and touched it up some with some fillets, threw it into an assembly and today's final digital mockup Parts List http://www.lowes.com/pd_568134-11678-TB180B_0__?storeNumber=0764&store_code=764&selectedLocalStoreBeanArray=%5Bcom.lowes.commerce.storelocator.beans.LocatorStoreBean%4033983398%5D&k_clickID=20ef1b48-b44b-4b90-acce-01d490aa42fa&productId=50119735-_-#img (leaf blower) http://www.3d-microscribe.com/G2%20Page.htm (micro scribe) plywood sheets 3D printer Plastic for 3D printer time Update: Sorry I did not ever get around to finishing this, my teacher had me move on to other projects and we never got around to it. Might re-visit it later.