Jet Powered Beer Cooler

April 22nd, 2008

What do you do if you have a shed, a warm day, a propane cylinder and a manly thirst for a cool beer? Why, you perform the only manly solution - construct a jet powered beer cooler! Simon Jansen explains:

Not being built for playing rugby I have had to go with the shed. I may not know a rugby hoop from a cricket stick but I know my shed like the head of my hammer. A shed is a place where a kiwi bloke spends much of his time alone surrounded by his tools, current and past half finished projects and the collection of parts and material usually referred to by others (typically wives/girlfriends) as ‘that pile of junk’.

A session in the shed is typically an all day affair. Starting very early in the morning and going through until late at night when the light fades to the point that you can’t see and hit your thumb with a hammer a bloke will not leave his shed for anything (Hint: Empty paint cans can be very useful here). All supplies must be taken in at the start of the shed session. And the most essential of these supplies is beer.

But how to keep the beer cold?

From here Simon progresses to the only logical, manly, solution:

I knew from some long forgotten physics lecture that when a liquid expands into a gas it will draw heat from its surroundings. And I happened to have a source of a suitable liquid right in my shed in the form of a LPG cylinder (liquid petroleum gas). Obviously it would not do to evaporate vast quantities of a flammable gas into the closed confines of my garage. That would probably be dangerous. What I needed was a way to remove the dangerous gas. The solution was obvious. The gas is flammable so why not burn it. Burning the gas with a normal burner would not use up the gas fast enough to give me any serious cooling. What I needed was a way to use up a lot of fuel very, very quickly.

What I needed was a jet engine!

See the rest of the story here.

Entry Filed under: General

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