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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."
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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.
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
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
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.
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?
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Why is he not cooling DB Draught or Monteiths, or better yet, Speights?? Having a small British mum is no excuse.
toeslikefingers.com - because
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?
hell yes. this is one of the best things i have seen in WEEKS. now all he needs to do is hook this up as a motorbike. then he'll have cold beer AND be able to cross town as a side-effect. just don't mention the side-effects beer consumption can have upon someone driving a jet-engine-propelled bicycle across town.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
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 :)
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.
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"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
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?
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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?
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
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For sale: Rhesus-Monkey-Torture-Kit 40$
Nope, but they have Jonah Lomu!
Hey watch it. I resemble that remark thankyou very much!
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gadgetophile.com
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.
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!
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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.
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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!
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finally, rocket science put to good use!
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.
..wait til he tries to split the beer atom..