This week’s selection is the Squeeze Powered Flywheel Fan by Printables contributor MrHegger.
This item is exactly as it seems: a hand-powered fan, almost entirely 3D printed. What’s not 3D printed? A rubber band, but we’ll come to that in a moment.
There are multiple parts to 3D print, as this is a mechanical assembly. Fortunately, MrHegger has provided the parts on print plate configurations where you can produce the parts in short order.
There is some basic assembly required, as you might expect, but it doesn’t appear to be challenging.
Using the fan is straightforward: just squeeze the trigger mechanism and mechanical energy is transferred to fan rotation.
But what’s that rubber band all about? It’s used to return the rack to its original position after a squeeze. This is quite important because this differs from many simple mechanical designs that have “one throw” mechanisms. These require the rack to be pulled back with more human effort, and result in the fan spinning one way forward, and the opposite way backwards.
This 3D model is quite different. Because the rubber band pulls the rack automatically, the squeezes turn the fan only in one direction. This means that repeated squeezes simply add more spin, making the fan rotate faster and faster.
More speed, more air!
Via Printables
