I have a couple of Comair/Rotron fans that I bought off Ebay and I use one of them to exhaust air out the side garage door when I paint since I don’t have a booth.
It looks like this:
This is a 10" fan producing 550 cfm and it spins pretty good at 1650 rpm.
The problem is that I don’t have blade guards on these fans and I just set it on top of the clothes dryer and put a small block of wood under each side to keep it from rolling while running. Today while I was spraying primer on my Skyraider I noticed the fan was not facing the open door the way I like so I grabbed it while running as I always do and made the mistake of grabbing too far towards the rear of the fan and had those spinning blades hit the tips of my index and middle fingers and it scared me to death. [:O]
It hurt fairly bad and the tips of them were fairly numb this afternoon because of the trauma they went through.
Fortunately I was not cut at all and only had the numbness in the tips as I did.
I should have known better as I am always around dangerous conditions at the foundry I work at and have never had an accident in 20 years. So be careful with those tools and make sure moving machines have guards on them! [soapbox]
I have learned my lesson and am going to find some material to make a blade guard for these things.
Whoa Mike!!! That was indeed a close one!! You should also figure out a way to hard mount them at least to a 2 X 4. You could just pop rivet some aluminum L-shaped tabs, and then screw 'em into the wood. I’ve had some close calls over the years, but the scariest was when I ran into a tree branch, and nearly ripped my eye out. Luckily, I blinked right as I ran into it, and it just tore my eyelid up, got 7 stitches from that one!!!
Don’t forget Radioshack, I know they have fans, so they might have the same fan guards!! Or maybe even OfficeDepot (may be a long shot, but perhaps computer stores may carry those protective covers).
You might want to just use some ‘window screen’ material that they sell at Home Depot. It’s pretty cheap and would likely do the trick. The ‘guard’ you posted above would be more rigid, but some ‘screen’ may be an option??
Take a look at the local car stereo shop(s). 10" waffle speaker covers would do the trick beautifully and they’re cheap! They’re also practically indestructable.
That’s exactly what I have been looking at. [:D]
I have found them for a little over $3 each online but most of the stereo shops I have seen them at are charging close to $10 each.
Murray,
I thought about screen material, but I was unsure as to how I would apply it to the surface as most of it is plastic.
I was thinking about something like that. They sell small screen like that at Home Depot that would work great. My brother-in-law owns a welding shop and I told him about it and he said he had some material there that is used for safety screen doors on houses that would work great. I will probably go and see what he has this weekend.
OUCH!! That hurts me just thinking about it! We as modelers naturally work around hazardous tools and materials. It’s only too easy to lose your concentration sometimes and do something potentialy dangerous.
I actually have a friend who cut off a fingerip off a fanblade. Consider buying just 4 pieces of wood and two screens. Building an elcosure for a fan is a relatively cheap, easy, and most importantly SAFE thing to do!
need me to machine you something? i need an excuse to use the lathe in tech [:)]
that musta been owned!
try buying one of those mesh garbage cans. mount. or try putting thin fabric to make sure you dont shove yur hand in there, and also, make an arrow pointing the way you want, and dont start it until you are sure the arrow is pointing the way you need.
Mike, I may have some 10" guards in my junk box. I know I’ve got several good-sized fans but I’m not sure if they are 10" and I’m not sure I have guards for them. I’ll look over the weekend and see.
On a similar note, I was outside one cold December night breaking in a .60 engine for a model airplane. It had, I think, a 12" wooden prop on it. I didn’t have a starter for it at the time, so I was cranking it by hand. It caught and started running backwards.
It was 25 years ago and I can remember this sooooooo plainly …
I said to myself, just grab the prop and stop it!
I grabbed the prop.
I said to myself, “Self that was really stupid”
The pain started.
Like you I was really afraid to look down. I did and everything was still attached but hurting like h***! The heavy leather gloves I had on had gashes almost all the way through, but not quite.
Thanks for the offer but my brother-in-law took one of the fans to his welding shop and he is going to make me a guard to go over the front and back.
He said he might just make the guards square and bigger than the fan so that the fan can sit on a flat surface.
Ouch about that prop story. [:0]
That was not a wise decision was it? [;)]
I did the same damn thing a few years ago with my first R/C plane. Only I wasn’t wearing gloves, and didn’t try to stop it. I didn’t get my finger out of the way fast enough when that thing kicked over, and it had a very sharp plastic edge on the blade!! I thought for sure my finger was gone, 'cause It was so cold that evening that my hands were numb to begin with!! Luckily everything was ok, but like you, I will never get that pain out of my head!!! I can remember it like yesterday…that and the time I had to eat a full plate of eggplant parmesian…gross!!! For a 9 year old, it just isn’t right. Unfortunately, even though my tastes have matured, I can still remember what that pile tasted like…and never again for me!!! LOL
Yup, I can relate. I will never, ever forget that whack. I was absolutely convinced that my fingers were somewhere over the treetops. Looking down to see if they were still there was a very hard thing to do.
No, it definitely was not[:I] I just stood there trying to decide whether to scream, look down to check my hand, or kick my own butt. That was finally the order I did things in!
Which reminds me of another incident … in fact it was about the same era as the prop incident. Probably too much alcohol in the world at that time.
Anyway I was working on my amplifier (2kw amateur radio amp). Per the instructions, I always discharged the filter caps by shorting the rectifier string to ground with a screwdriver. Stuck my screwdriver in there, discharged the caps, burned the tip off my screwdriver, unplugged the damn amplifier (step ONE in the instructions!) and tried again.
Next, and this one wasn’t me but it’s real funny … one of the electrical engineers I used to work with was checking a wall receptacle in the office that wasn’t working right. He stuck his multimeter probes in the receptacle, zero voltage, everything OK. Pulled the faceplate off, stuck a screwdriver in it, got kicked against the wall. Checked it again with the multimeter, no voltage, stuck screwdriver in, got zapped again. One of the other designers standing there nudged me and pointed to the multimeter. He hadn’t plugged the probe leads into the meter. We told him after he got hit 4 or 5 times.
