Cooling Vest

If you work outside this time of year, the heat can get unbearable, even dangerous in a short time. This Cooling Vest will help you to "keep your cool" while working outside.

First of all, I'd like to give credit where credit is due. My dear wife of 38+ years of marriage (6 of them happy) did all of the construction of this vest. I just came up with the idea.

The downside is that she comes up with all kinds of stuff for me to do outside now.

The lining of CLEAN UNUSED adult diapers is, by design, highly absorbent and becomes a gel when "activated". If you take the lining from several diapers and a mixture of water and alcohol you can create a mixture that doesn't get rock hard, but is more like a slushy soft drink when frozen. The alcohol to water mix ratio is kind of up to you. You might want to experiment. We're trying 50/50, and 25(alcohol)/75 mixtures now.

Scoop out some of the alcohol and water gel into standard size sandwich bags and place flat on a rack in the freezer for 24 hours. Double bag the sandwich bags (one up, one down) to prevent leakage.

We tried to find a fabric that was both breathable and somewhat water resistant so that the vest would cool me but not soak my clothes from condensation from the cool packs.

The pockets on the vest are just the right size to slip the frozen cool packs into. A small Velcro patch keeps the flaps on the pockets closed and keeps the cool packs from falling out.

My wife wanted to Velcro the front of the vest as well, but the pockets filled with cool packs made it a little too snug to wear that way. We used some nylon straps with plastic buckles left over from another project for the front closure.

I jokingly told her that I needed a cool pack for my hat too. It looks like that's going to be another Instructable.

Oh well, off to work.