Slashdot Mirror
The Jet Powered Beer Cooler
kzadot writes: "A bit of good old kiwi ingenuity, you can make a jet engine in your own home, and keep your beers cool as a side effect. And not a single piece of Number 8 wire in sight. Full instructions included."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Slashdot goes back to its roots, and displaying something truly geeky and cool. This is why I read Slashdot.
Posted by Kewlhandtek:
so this is what Yahoo Serious did after he split the beer atom
Just how many relatives does your family tree have? Or is it a branchless tree?
Don't take life too seriously. It is only a temporary situation. Usual disclaimers apply.
And thus it is for pussies without the balls to experiment, without the minds to investigate and without a clue to observe.
Yep, it's like your average Seppo.
Don't take life too seriously. It is only a temporary situation. Usual disclaimers apply.
Ahh, so you tilt your heads back and get your mates to urinate down your throats then?
A note to the rest of the world. A considerable number of Lion Red "drinkers", in order to make that piss from a syphalitic donkey with renal disease sound good, call it Lione Rouge.
Don't take life too seriously. It is only a temporary situation. Usual disclaimers apply.
For chrissakes, a stout needs to be served at room temperature goddammit!
So you are saying that Guiness, who brew the shit he was cooling, are wrong with what they print on the can? Let me guess. You drink that stale piss from a horse with various social diseases know as Budweiser and consider that to be a good beer too?
Don't take life too seriously. It is only a temporary situation. Usual disclaimers apply.
The cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems.
--
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Liquid nitrogen. Much better than dry ice. Plus you can make icecream with it if necessary (as I recall, fairly good icecream too).
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Maybe this combined with a turbine connected to a generator to generate the power to run an overclocked Athlon running cool, also from this. ;-)
The first jet powered cooled overclocked Athlon with Beer Fridge. No worries about noisy fans with this one either
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
Funny how it has "Serve extra cold" on the can then, isn't it?
I once saw a methane (natural gas) powered refigerator in a local store. It didn't use any electricity, just a connection to a tank of methane. Does anyone know how these work?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
yeah Lion Red or Speights, but Lion sponsor that gawd awful 'fake' rugby game though.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Sweet! I've always wanted to do this! Not cooling beer, but making a turbo into a little jet engine. Ages ago I was explaining to my little bro that a turbo and a 747 jet engine are more or less the same thing, which got me thinking how I'd try to do it :)
And now this bloke's beaten me to it. I was gonna have a play and see what I could do when I upgrade the turbo on my 180sx! There goes my chance to get slashdotted!
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Some will say "That's the point!!!"
But with something like this going 100,000 RPM when it may only be designed for 7,000-10,000 RPM
- It could easily fly apart with deadly fragments flying through the air, with the energy of something approaching a hand grenade, not to mention the danger when this happens of the LPG tank going up and taking the garage with it in a big fireball.
I will say that again -
THIS IS PROBABLY DANGEROUS
Approach carefully and with caution.
PS: I laughed a lot and thought it cool, but I would not like to see any one hurt by doing things like this.
There are almost half a million /. accounts - imagine if just 20% of them read /. in a 1 hour window and clicked that link
I think your estimate of just 20% of slashdot readers at any time is a bit high. The average slashdot reader would have to be on slashdot almost 5 hours a day to reach this. This maybe normal for you and me, but on average?
Nice to see articles like this again. No MSFT bashing, no lawsuits, no layoffs, just pure news for nerds.
My question is, how much thrust does his jet produce? Could it be used to power, say, a hovercraft made from junk? I'd like to see something like this on [Junkyard|Scrapyard] Wars - ten hours to build a working jet powered (thing).
Also, could he attach a generator to the spindle of the turbo and make electric power?
Given the rate of consumption of propane he'd have to get to create the degree of cooling, I'd guestimate that he could produce better than 10kW of power from this thing. That's enough to run your house.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I know this guy quite well, and saw the engine running yesterday.
Yes, he is crazy. At work we call him Freak.
But then, this is the third time his website has been slashdotted, by my count, which is more than you can say for most people.
I work with this guy.
:)
> what caused him to want to do this?
There might be some clue in the fact that at work we call him Freak. Another clue is that he bought a house with an extra bedroom so he had room for the life-sized R2D2 model he was building. Some people do things like that and for the rest of us it's better to just accept the fact and make sure we don't stand too close.
> pointy haird boss with tie
As it happens, his boss doesn't wear a tie. We're pretty casual here.
What really happens is you'll get frostbite. Very quickly. A few drops of liquid nitrogen on your skin won't hurt -- as it boils, the gaseous nitrogen will act as an insulator, but more of it can freeze your skin in seconds -- and that's exactly what frostbite is.
I grew up in Alaska, and they used to show this `frostbite film' every year, probably in the hopes of scaring you into being careful (it was quite gross what frostbite can do.) Frostbite induced by a little bit of liquid nitrogen isn't likely to be anywhere near as serious (because you usually only freeze a little bit of skin, not the entire extremity), but it's still best avoided.
As geeky as that may be, that solution might cost a lot in the long run. You have to continually buy the fuel, and that would cut into my Computer money. ;) Plus you would be adding to global warming problem.
I have a better solution, and it cost anywhere for $12 (or less) to $21+. Buy a plastic cooler ($10 to $20) of the appropiate size you need. Then buy a few bags of ice. Around here, it's about $1 for a decent sized bag. Fill the coller with the ice, and place the beer in the cooler.
If you have electricity in the shed, buy a compact refridgerator.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I'm sure the Irish LOVE being called "British".
Although, I was a bit surprised as not that many people over here seem to prefer Guiness to local beers.
And DB Draught???!? Which side of the tracks do you live on??? We all drink Lion Red or Ranfurly over here....
(Just kidding, I consumed lots of Speights last night and ended up doings things with people I shouldn't have done... anyway, add Macs Gold to your list as well).
Couple this with a turbine and generator to produce power to run your computer and tools. The more you work, the more and cooler beer you can have.
yes absolute nutbars, all of them.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
What cooled the beer had nothing to do with the jet engine. It was just the expanding gas taking up heat.
He could of just put out his cig, opened the valve on the thing and let it roar, and it would get nice and chilly. Big smell though, and if some drives up causes a spark it might knock down the shed.
He could use a take of compressed air with perfect safety however.
I admitt my instincts would be to build the jet engine too. It's gotta be useful for something. (not that cold beer isn't useful).
I was starting to get bummed out what with all the stifling of innovation going on with the DMCA and the MPAA and the RIAA and Microsoft and all that crap. Maybe more real-world hardware hacking is in order. Maybe it's time to abandon computers and start poking around with nuclear materials, megawatt lasers, railguns and large, high powered engines. This article has really cheered me up!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ah, I know! Hook the turbine up to a generator, and use it to power your next LAN party! Jet engines, cold beer and Quake. Who could ask for more?
--
My response was more like "What kind of heathen refridgerates beer?"
But yea... Guiness is definitly in the class of beers that should be served at or close to room temperature.
What the hell is wrong with people. I finnaly find a bar with people I like, and they serve a beer thats not too bad (Petes wicked ale), but I have to wait like an hour before my beer is even at a drinkable temperature!
And yes, I am a born and raised American. I suppose its what I get from living in a place where beer companies can get away with putting more rice in their beer than barley.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Why is he not cooling DB Draught or Monteiths, or better yet, Speights?? Having a small British mum is no excuse.
toeslikefingers.com - because
It's a Peltier cooler for your cans. Looks more afordable as it runs on electrical power.
this is a much better alternative to drinking bud light with ice cubes. i've seen things in grocery stores that cool a bottle of wine in 1 minute. it's just spinning water... anyone know about this?
I wonder how many other people here are now tempted to try something as potentially dangerous as this now.
I think a beer mug with a copper base plate in .. :-p
combination with a peltier embedded coaster
would be pretty damn cool.
While I was a chopper machine in the army, a friend told me about a very neat trick some units use to cool down the beer for battalion/squadron parties. They attach 2.75" unguided rocket stores on the external mounting points. Cobras and Apaches can carry 4 stores each. Now, 2.75" also happens to be about the diameter of a beer can, and each store can hold 19 rockets. Because the tubes are about 5' long, a single store can hold a lot of beer.
So they load the stores up, take the chopper up to 10,000 ft, fly around for 10-20 minutes and then come back down. This gets the beer nice and cold.
"Get as drunk as you can be in the Arrrrrmy!"
"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?"
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
I suspect -80 beer wouldn't be fun to drink though :)
"Got any beer Bob?"
"Yea, hold on"
Bob flips on the jet engine...
"Say, uh, Bob, whatcha doin with a jet engine?"
"Oh, it cools the beer"
"Oh... O... K..."
Do you get my drift?
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
This was discussed, of course. :) In the summer, you still have a need for hot water. In the winter, you still have a need for cold drinks. And you always have a need for electricity. ;)
:)
Like I said though, this contraption probably isn't *that* useful, but my idea was more useful than the original one.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
If it wasn't enough that he was using a compressor not to re-compress the gas he was expanding, but to run a jet engine, he's topping it off by building an afterburner on it to roast weinies when the exhaust is already hot enough to broil them in seconds. He seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to Tim on Home Improvement.
:)
However, I see a possible useful application for this. This very contraption could be used as a combination hot water heater/air conditioner/electrical generator for his home. Just add a generator on the get turbine, immerse the propane tank in a coolant to circulate where needed, and pipe the jet exhaust through the orifice normally used by a natural gas flame in your natural gas hot water tank. I somehow doubt that this would be efficient at all three jobs, but hey, his concept wasn't any less silly, that's for sure.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Any other ideas?
Sub Zero Beer
Good idea, I didn't really consider it (seemed too cold to use to keep things just above freezing). However, dry ice is easier to obtain for most people.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I have to admit, this hack to cool a bunch of beers is truly amusing. However, the best part about the article was the author's witty humor:
"If I ever do get a car it will be something to tinker with and be small, old and British. Just like my mum. "
"A closer inspection of the can shows how it quite clearly states 'SERVE EXTRA COLD'. It is interesting to note that here is one of few times a bloke will actually read the instructions for anything. Ever. "
and so on.
Although a jet engine is a fast and furious way to cool beer, I present a few practical and impractical alternatives to accomplish the same task.
1.) Duh. Buy a mini-refridgerator/freezer. Set it to the coldest setting possible. If no power is available in a given shed (though this was his garage), run a nice long extension cord from the house. This should get below 5 degrees Celcius. This solution is costly, slow, and gets no points for creativity. Moving along...
2. Dry ice. Dry ice is much colder than freezing temperature, but properly insulated it could serve to create a long-lasting ice box from which to cool the beer. Care must be taken not to bring the beer to freezing point, as that would obviously ruin it and damage the cans. Obtaining more dry ice is annoying, but so is obtaining more propane.
3.) My memory of chemical reactions fails me, but I do recall a variety of endothermic (takes in heat from surroundings) reactions that could be employed to draw away heat from the cans of beer. However, most reactions I recall would require vast quantities in order to cool to the desired temperature. Nonetheless, put in a well-insulated device, with some sort of quantitative control over chemical reaction, this could work. What would be even cooler (no pun intended) is to have an automatic temperature monitor that would mix more chemicals when the temperature got above a certain point. Yes, essentially a thermostat for an endothermic reaction.
Any other ideas?
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
As cool as a jet engine is (wow...) I would of have bought big plastic bags, filled them up with the expanding gas, sealed the bags, got throughly drunk with my cold beer and then shot the bags with a flare gun and watch mini-mushroom clouds appear in my backyard. ;)
Come on. Being a pyro keeps you sane
BTW, this also works with 2 liter pop bottles (plastic) filled with a bit (1/4 bic lighter) of butane. Just throw those into a camp fire (watching for stray sparks of course, to avoid setting forest fires, and be sure to be about 10 feet away when you throw it).
Come on, whats better - cold beer and explosions shortly thereafter or cold beer and a jet engine that takes weeks to build?
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
So, when these things finally hit the market, why would you buy it?
1. You have beer on tap (at your house of course) and need a way to cool it.
2. You have petroleum gas on tap, and need a way to use it.
3. You have neither on tap, but need a reason to get both (on tap).
This new jet-engine-cooler begs the question... is this truly the man's barbeque? It cools, it charbroils, it's a jet engine!
One small difficulty is you'd have to lash your fixins down lest they be blown into the next county.
You could use the rotary motion of the turbine to perform some useful function as well. Perhaps providing a mobile platform for the jetberque?
why do i get the feeling that this guy has overclocked his pentium II to run quicker than my brand new athlon?
You don't drink stouts at room temperature. (note the period)
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
If you follow the links at the bottom, you'll see that the beer cooling effect was more of an "accident" ... just an afterthought.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
If you were to attach wheels and some sort of steering mechanism to your jet engine you could use the propulsion to goto the store and get MORE Beer! Hence, when you get back to the shed your beer will again be cold! And you won't run out!
LFS. Have you built your system today?
Check out his links at the bottom, specifically how he built his engine He didn't build the engine to cool beer, he did it just for the hack; just because he could. IMHO, this is even better.
Not that the beer page wasn't funny or anything...
And for those where Stanford has blocked the subnets of their ISP :-/
Thanks
--------
For sale: Rhesus-Monkey-Torture-Kit 40$
....but this is just stupid.
fear my zig!
Not my room. I need an air conditioner :(
Now I can cool all that free beer everyone's talking about.
Reminds me of a New Zealander who I used to have on the same Rugby team as me...
He had a story about how there was a rumor concerning an old house that had a beer buried within its walls.
This remained occupied for about 25 years or so, and when it finally became abandoned a whole group of friends went off to this house to see if the rumors were true. After digging through the crumbling walls they did indeed find it to be true, a bottle of beer was indeed their. Now the unbelievable happened, they opened the beer and each took a sip, and each kept saying how disgusting it was, but they continued until they were totally rat a*sed and the bottle ran dry...
Not surprised one of them made this contraption for cooling beer!
Matt
Nope, but they have Jonah Lomu!
Guiness SHOULD be served cold. Go into any pub in the UK or Ireland and ask for a Guiness and you will find that it is served up cold. There is now an additional variety called "Guiness Extra Cold" which is served in many pubs over here, but I prefer the original. Perhaps you are confusing Guiness with Bitters which SHOULD be served at room temperature?
On the subject of ammonia refrigerators, those Miracle-Gro feeders where you fill up the plastic canister with powdered Miracle-Gro and attach it to a hose get very cold when water starts mixing with the powder. This is because Miracle-Gro is mostly ammonium nitrate, which undergoes an endothermic reaction when mixed with water. There are instant cold packs available which contain a bit of ammonium nitrate and a small vial of water. Bend and snap (like a chem-light) and the water mixes with the ammonium nitrate and there you have it- instant cold. Heating ammonium nitrate drives the water off so it becomes solid again, and the process can be repeated. I think someone once developed an adsorption cycle refrigerator that used ammonium nitrate and water as the refrigerant.
The burner is made out of a sawed off chunk of thick black pipe with a smaller piece of pipe centered in the bottom with a pipe cap on the end and a hole drilled in the pipe cap. This makes a simple, yet effective venturi burner.
Fill the wash tub with water, hook it to a propane tank (use a looong hose and an adjustible regulator), light the burner and turn it on full blast. (If the pipe ain't glowing orange hot you ain't got the gas turned on enough, yet too much gas will cause it to flame out.) A standard gas grill sized tank oughta be enough to boil two sacks.
Then dump in lotsa salt and cayenne pepper, onions, potatoes, corn, garlic and lemons. (See recipe at http://www.neworleansweb.org/recipe4.html).
By the time the water's boiling, there oughta be a quarter inch thick layer of frost on the tank from that south Louisiana humidity, so go ahead and stick the tank in the other wash tub, you know, the one that was full of beer and ice, but now is only half full of warm beer and water because someone forgot to get an extra bag of ice.
Who needs a wife when you've got cold beer?
>Freon is better and less noisy.
But also comes with less bragging points.
Matt
ISTR seeing similar on pyro pages..take 2 refuse bags, fill one with an oxyacetelyne mix, and the other with helium. Tie together, attach slow-burning fuse, & release.
Not that I condone this, of course...
Matt
The phrase describes the pseudo distributed denial of service attack (dDOS) that occurs on a site that gets linked in a /. story Basically a site is slashdotted when people can't bring up the site because so many other /. people are trying to as well - Its from all the nerds clicking on the link at about the same time thus overwhelming the poor target webserver. If the bandwidth pipe isn't overwhelmed than the webserver is (often due to the server it runs on or Max # of processes being set to 100 or 150 or soemthing) There are almost half a million /. accounts - imagine if just 20% of them read /. in a 1 hour window and clicked that link - hating it!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
OK - So even 10% and I forgot to mention that there are hundreds of thousands of Anonymous COwards out there without accounts that will also hit a site So yes, 20% might be high - but when you factor in all the non account holders - then the number gets even higher. Bottom line is hundeds and hundreds of people hit that link at the same time for an extended period often overwhelming a poor APache server set to 150 concurrent connections.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Of course - whats scary is someone operating a jet engine while drinking beer - shouldn't there be some sorta law? (KIDDING!)
I loved his tongue in cheek description of the project. But I'd really like to know, er, what caused him to want to do this? I mean it is really cool and I can imagine when he has parties, all the male folk and even some of the ladies flock to the shed to see his toy.
I also laughed to see the intake right behind the control panel - hmm the possibilities - pointy haird boss with tie visists "Here, sir, just stand at the control panel here and hit this red button. " Problem solved!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
2 Centigrade? Who the hell drinks Guiness at that ungodly temperature?
For chrissakes, a stout needs to be served at room temperature goddammit!
Dancin Santa
finally, rocket science put to good use!
And this is another late entry ;-)
and for the goat shy...
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/lascool1. html
Use the jet to make electricty to power a laser and get VERY cold beer...
Anarchists never rule
Just wanted to mention to those who have not run into the concept of film boiling yet how this amazingly cool phenomenon works. It's called the Leidenfrost Effect and a 1977 Scientific American article written by a hilariously brave professor is what sparked my original interest in science.
A reprint can be found at http://www.lovephy.com/public_html/exp/2000exp/lei den1.html
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
...beer is the true mother of invention!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Forgive me for being such a n00b, but what exactly happens when a site gets Slashdotted?
-==-
We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Ah Yes, but in the stupidity lies the true genius.
Finally, the Rock has come back to Slashdot.
A jet poowered beer cooler....
Doesn't this sound like a Darwin Award waiting to happen?
Finally, the Rock has come back to Slashdot.
http://www.physics.otago.ac.nz/research/bec/
Freon is better and less noisy.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
..wait til he tries to split the beer atom..
But really, wouldn't using Liquid Nitrogen to cool it make more sense since it's naturally cold when it's liquid? (Yes it also means that if you can keep it from expanding, you can keep ur Athlon below freezing)
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Next thing you know, we'll start using 1500 lb move 150lb's of person to and from work.. oh wait.. doh.
Though it would be horribly wasteful, you could be sure that your computer is the source of much techno-penal-envy. Apply the same cooling process to your overclocked CPU, invite some friends over to check out your new processor, and... "Hold on a sec while I turn on the 'fan'."
Way cool - a turbine, but (sadly) the jet has nothing to do with the cooling. It's just a way to burn off the propane. (so, technically, the jet engine is actually a safety feature!) Basic thermodyanics is doing the cooling - a gas cools as it expands (and heats as it is compressed). Opening the valve on the propane tank will work as well (better even, with a bit more risk). Classic hack - lots of noise and a nearly overlooked feature lost (or even hidden) inside. If the turbine ran a compressor you could really cool it! But then you'd have to call it engineering.
Being a brewery owner, which inherently forces you to become gadget-master, I truly can appreciate this story. Now if someone could only come up with a solar powered bottler, or a nuclear keg cleaner...