Design-wise the course I took was to use a lamp boom/arm and mount the fan on that, so it could be positioned as close to, or over the soldering job.

Half an hour of solidworks later, I had 3 laser cut parts. Two grills and a spacer consisting of 5 and 3mm acrylic to get to and 8mm space to accomodate 2 sheets of filter material. With the filter I went the only way I knew which was using an activated charcoal foam sheet which is sold for exhaust hoods. So I cut it out in the shape of the spacers.

Then I just dismantled the cheapest boom-arm lamp I could find and mounted the fan onto that. Of course it took me three tries to get the holes right. Tired, I guess.

All assembled, and waiting for a speed controller:

On to the speed controller. I briefly thought about using an Arduino to provide the PWM for the 4 wire fan I used, but then I realized I hadn’t used a really old friend in a long time. My good old buddy, the 555 timer. I found a schematic online to provide the high frequency PWM for 4 fire fans and built the schematic on a small perfboard after trying it out on the breadboard first. This way, I didn’t need any voltage regulators and I saved loads of space.

I’ve fallen in love with this lamp arm. It’s so cheap (around 5 euro) and versatile! I also built a microphone adapter for it, for a friend of mine.

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Started off by making a quick design in Solidworks, because all the components were to be printed or laser cut.

This was what I came up with. The bobbins of the ten coils to be 3d printed, and all other parts laser cut out of clear acrylic or two colour ABS. Thankfully I had some left over 1.5mm Black-Gold ABS which came in handy for the components in the middle of the reactor, because those were all black and gold. The center grill was cut out of silver and blue ABS. The ring and back plates were cut out of 5mm clear acrylic.

What is still missing from the design is a way to illuminate the middle of the reactor and also a housing. This is because I thought a NodeMCU would fit inside to maybe serve up a web page in order to control the LEDs or some fun functionality like that, so I didn’t want to rush it.

I then got started on cutting the acrylic parts. I didn’t have any frosted acrylic so I sanded it with 800 grit sandpaper and some WD-40. Worked like a charm:

On to assembly while the bobbins are printing:

I had to sand down the leds in order for them to fit into the 5mm acrylic base plate:

After that, I could start winding the coils. I didn’t count the number of turns because, well, you know…

I ran out of luck with the leds and only had 8 out of 10 I needed, but they were enough for the initial lighting test. PSA: Don’t use cyanoacrylate on transparent acrylic if you need it back-lit. It is noticeably more opaque.

I hope I’ll be able to continue this project soon, even though I’m really low on free time.

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Laser cut with 0.1mm outside kerf compensation to get that “hammer” fit.

Added some cheap window gaskets:

Then I just cut two square shapes to hold the PVC sheets. Turns out this was a bad idea because of the way that plywood bends under heat.

The way I tried to heat up the plastic was with a cheap electric radiator and a hot air blower. The radiator didn’t have enough power to get the plastic soft enough and the blower wasn’t uniform enough and kept either not softening the plastic at all, or just completely melting it.

Anyway, this was my best attempt:

Gotta go buy me some of that fancy HIPS I guess. Maybe a more powerful heater too.

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