Gear Box Fan

My partner, Wade Rosenbaum, and I, Johann Ruiz, had decided to instruct you guys on how to make a Gear Box Fan. This idea is inspired by how close the summer is coming up . This is planned to be a portable fan for people to carry around when the temperature gets a little to hot. The plan was to have a crank connected to gears inside of a box, which then have the gears connected to fan blades. When the user spins the crank, the gears would rotate inside the box, thus leading the spinning of the fan blades. The bevel gear design is being used because it has a better 90 degree connection with the fan blades. This fan is portable, can be used placed on your desktop, and cheap to build. We hope you enjoy designing the Gear Box Fan as much as we did!

Here is the file where you can access the design. When clicking upon the file, you can change certain dimension of the Gear Box Fan if you have Fusion 360 or another 3D design software. This allows you to change certain parts such as the gears to make the fan spin faster or slower by changing the gear ratio. While other programs can be used for this project Fusion 360 supports integrated scripts that can create working gears for the user so they don’t have to go through external programs.

After the designing is done and you’re ready to print the Gear Box Fan. There are many places you can go to print out 3D design. You can check at your school or library to see if they have a maker space or you can even send the file to certain companies that are able to print it out. When you do go to print out the 3D object make sure to put the components of the system in separate files to make it easier to print.

When assembling the hand cranked fan, put the parts together in a specific order shown to avoid collision with other objects. The following section of this step will provide the correct order of assembly, along with assisting images, and should be followed as closely as possible. If needed parts can be sanded to allow them to fit and/or move as intended. Here is a video that can act as a helpful guide when following the steps to assemble the hand crank fan:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7FkIuiLB_enMFl5M...

1. A small gear should be put on the main crank shaft and the two should be put within the hole in the base plate. The bottom of the gear should be half an inch from the bottom of the shaft. The shaft should spin freely within the hole.

2. The crank body and limbs are put together and super glued together.

3. The large gear is fitted to the smaller gear attached to the main crank shaft. Then the side of the wall is placed next to it while the assembled crank is put on. The crank should spin freely while the box side should be fixed with superglue after insuring that the crank works as intended. If needed pieces of paper can be used to shim the wall side up or it can be sanded down to be at the correct height for the crank to spin.

4. After the wall with the crank has been attached another small gear can be attached to the crank shaft with it’s bottom 3.9 inches from the bottom of the crank shaft.

5. Then the last gear is attached to the final rod to act as an attachment for the fan blades. The rod will slide into the box side with a hole.

6. All of the internal components have now been put in place and the remaining box sides are attached to finalize the project.

After it is built, we expect it to work as well as we designed it to. The rotation of the gears is 2.5 faster than how fast you turn the crank, so a lot of air will be coming out of the fan blades. Above you can see a wooden prototype we built before designing it in Fusion 360. We built it before we started to designing to give us a visual understanding on how we wanted to the fan to work. It doesn’t have the fan blades, but it shows how all the gears would turn in real life. One think would could do better after looking at the design is another way the user could spin the gears. Instead of spinning the crank, you would stick a finger in the middle of the gear and spin your finger, making it easier if your multitasking. We also thought that we could print out other accessories that could go at the end of the last gear instead of fan blades, making it more useful to the user. Human error can be encountered through all the steps shown above. One problem that we had to overcome was when the gears were colliding with each other. The way we fixed this problem was by reaching out to a friend who knew more about Fusion 360 then we did and he helped us out. In conclusion, we had a fun time instructing you how to design, print, and build it and hope it comes to use in those hot summer days.