by 84-1074663779 » Tue Jan 27, 2004 11:18 pm
You are quite right Lou. I think every one of us has gone through the leaf blower stage. I ended up burning out a brand new one pretty quickly, with too much restriction and not enough airflow to cool the motor.
The blower is really the biggest limitation of what you finally end up with, so spend some time testing various bare blowers before you build the main flowbench enclosure. There are lots of ways of doing it, available electrical power is what finally restricts most of us. Shifting air at decent pressure requires a lot of horsepower and amps.
The most popular solution is lots of vacuum cleaner motors, but I am not sure this is the best way to go about it. I use a large single centrifugal forge blower, pulley driven from a three phase motor. It runs at quite high speed to develop sufficient flow and pressure. A supercharger would also work very well, but is expensive unless you happen to already have something suitable.