2022.01 - 2022.05 Fume Hood

Can you believe its taken me 27 years to learn how to use a drill? SMH

Parts:

  1. Attaching wooden frame to fumehood.

  2. Attaching the ventilation system (Designed and 3D printed adapter)

  3. front panel

Eric made a fumehood a lifetime ago, but it was sagging, so we decied to fix it up (for projects that required chemistry or soldering).

<Pic inc>

We almost murdered each other while creating it, because I didn't want to measure anything and then Eric called it bad afterwards, which deeply offended me. Rodger is perfect.

Colorless Fluff ep. 33

(1) Attaching a wooden frame

(1) We took apart all of the pieces and screwed wooden pieces to them. We ended up drilling pilot holes for each one. (2) We created a wooden frame around the top, jointed with epoxy and popsicle sticks. (3) finished frame.

The plastic L-brackets were replaced with metal ones. The screws remained the same.

Here's the final summary of screw positions and errors that we made during the process. I measured each one out because Eric was complaining about how bad it was. Honestly, idk why he insisted it was so bad. I'd basically never held a screwdriver before, so it completely satisfied my expectations XD.

(2) Design of a fan-hose adapter

< pic of Tinkercad build here>

I can't seem to find the Tinkercad file right now, which is a shame, because I did such a good job at modeling this, with pretty limited objects and actions. I really ought to learn how to use blender, but it seems so hard...

The hose side needed to be printed twice. I did not in fact, know, when I designed the part, whether it would fit on the hose. The hose itself is a screw, but I did not really have the ability to create the screw shape in tinker cad, so the "bolt side (?)" actually had flat threads, and we were just hoping the flexibility of the hose would accept this. It did!! You can't even imagine how excited I was when the piece actually screwed in. I MEASURED AND IT WORKED. (Eric scolded me really hard :<, in part 1)

The fan side was much simpler. Just a square frame. The hose circumference exceeded the fan side-length by a little bit, so we printed an extension to the frame. I'd added a bit of width to account for plastic shrinkage, but it was actually still hard to squeeze the fan in. It worked though.

And here's Rodger with his fan!

(3) Design of a front panel

Hoods normally have a sliding front panel. Eric and I went through what seemed like a billion and a half designs to get something that was easily attachable/detachable. Here's where I think we really did a shit job. (It was my shit job, as I did probably 90% of it)

Plan A was to use these bed rail brackets off Amazon to create a fully detachable hood that would just hook on and off. We spent a frustratingly high amount of time coming up with this design and implementing it, only for it to fail because the dimensions weren't precise enough for the front piece to easily slide on and off. Rodger completely warped every time we tried to slide this thing on and off. It was also terribly heavy, and even if all of the measurements had been exact, probably wouldn't have been easy either way.

Plan B-D were all my plans. Basically I wanted to use epoxied magnets to get the front to slide on and off. After all, neodynium magnets are really strong right?

First, I tested the mechanism I planned to use to imbed the magnets in the wood. The magnets were one cm in size, so I went to the hardware store to purchase a 13/32 in. bit, so I could drill close-to-1cm holes in the wood.I stuck the magnets into these holes and epoxied them in, using gravity to try and ensure that the magnets were planar on the surface.

Then, , I measured how strong these small circular magnets were using this weird experiment where I hung scissors from them. IIRC one contact held something crazy like 200+ grams of scissors.

I budgeted a 50% drop in effectiveness for god-knows-what reason, and calculated that I should use 12 contacts (24 magnets) to hold up the 1.2 kg front panel. IT DIDN'T WORK. the contacts were far less than 50% effective. My estimate is maybe 10%.

Plan C was to make the magnets larger. I tried these bar magnets instead of the circular ones, but these magnets were weak compared to their size.

Plan D was frankly so embarassing that I don't even have photos of it (lmfao). I imbedded like 60 of the small circular magnets in wood. The density of the magnets was so high that all of them flipped a shit while I was trying to epoxy them in.I had to use an exactoknife to carve a couple of them out and re-set them. The wood also shattered because I had to drill the holes too close together.

The front panel barely stays up. BUT HEY. It was interesting XD.