How To Design & Build Centrifugal Fans For the Home Shop

Está muy comprensivo.

I’m the kind of person who will consider building something before buying it, and I’ve had my eye on this book for quite some time – ever since I read the ‘Build your own Metalworking Shop from Scrap’ series by the same author. I built the charcoal furnace and have successfully done some aluminium casting from the instructions in the books, but I’ve outgrown the capacity of the furnace and built a bigger (and hopefully better) one which will be fuelled by propane and/or waste engine oil.I used a vacuum-cleaner type fan in the past, but the noise of the brush motor really annoys me so I decided to build a centrifugal fan, powered by a nice quiet induction motor. I tried a few designs of my own by ‘guesstimation’, without too much success, but was really hankering after this Gingery book to give me the push in the right direction I needed. I checked all the libraries over four neighbouring counties, but none of them had in their collections, so I (eventually) looked on Amazon.I saw that they had it in a print version, and a Kindle version too. This is much more convenient, since I could be reading it within minutes as opposed to waiting for it to arrive in the mail. I bought and paid for it online, and was indeed able to read it within minutes. I actually tried to download it as a PDF file so that I could use it on various devices other than a Kindle – according to Amazon’s ‘Help’ section this should be an option, but not one that I could find. I have a Kindle Reader application on my PC anyway, so it wasn’t really a problem – and even if I hadn’t, I could have downloaded the reader app from Amazon for free anyway.The text of the book is written in Dave Gingery’s familiar chatty style – almost as if you’re sitting by the fire with him. Very easy to read, yet packed with excellent information. It guides the reader through various designs to satisfy different criteria, along with the practical construction methods used. The engineering principles involved are sound, and I have no doubt that a fan built to the specifications will perform very well.The book also includes instructions to make simple test equipment to check the performance of the fan you’ve built.The subject is somewhat mathematical, but I was easily able to follow the maths involved. Dave Gingery breaks it all down into a logical progression so that it’s easy to understand, with only the relevant maths involved at each stage. I did an HND in Mechanical Engineering many years ago, so I ought to be able to follow it, but I don’t believe that anybody would struggle with it so long as they can use a pocket calculator.TIP: I took the time and trouble to write a spreadsheet routine in Excel so that I could change any or all of three variables and instantly see the changes in output volume, pressure and the motor requirement rather than flogging my way through the sums all the time. If you’re planning to build a fan using this book it’s a good way to go.I’ve settled on a design for the fan I want to build to suit my requirements, but am now waiting for the weather to improve enough for me to be able to weld outside. It could take a while in the UK . . .I would heartily recommend this book to anybody who has an interest in building a centrifugal fan for any reason. The Kindle version is MUCH cheaper than the print version and very quick to download. The on-screen quality is excellent and is very easy to read; it is, of course, easy to enlarge or reduce the size of the text on screen to suit individual preferences.