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By: Mehdi Sadaghdar
0:00 What’s inside a Hair Dryer
1:08 Making a Foam Cutter
3:50 Making a Fuse?!
4:21 Making an Engraver
6:04 Making a Smoke Extractor
7:53 Making Power Resistors
9:25 How a Potentiometer Works

Today we want to get into the amazing world of a hairdryer and you can can harvest a few components from the hairdryer like the heating element. Which is a of resistive wires. This one. I've used before in my seat warmer video also a bunch of switches.

A dc motor. A full bridge rectifier. A power cord. A fuse and a thermal breaker.

Let's heat it up oh. It popped open. So it opens. The circuit.

When the temperature rises above some threshold. It's pretty much like a fixed thermostat and we can do a world of projects with these and learn. Which is mostly for me to do and for you to only watch. If you kids want to do educational projects.

You can actually do then head on to my sponsor kirikou. They provide a ton of different fun project crates in steam for different age groups and using my link kiwicocom. Electroboom you can get 50 off your first month of any crate. But my projects are educational projects.

Done by a certified professional failure prone dumbass excuse for a human being such as myself. So let's make things you can unwind the heater element. And use it for multiple different purposes. First let's make a foam cutter out of it you cut like 20 centimeter of wire and straighten.

It then you need one of these plastic clamps you can find in your dad's toolbox for some reason. These have holes at the end of the handle you pass the wire through it and twist. It then open the clamp a little bit pass. The wire through the hole and twist.

It again now if you let go of the clamp its spring will keep the wire stretched. Now we can just tie the power cord across the element and plug it in it blew. Like a fuse you can make a fuse out of these wires. Okay.

Let's not lose focus first. I'll make a foam cutter. Then i'll make a fuse. This wire is around 250 milli ohms per inch.

So over four inches and 120 volts. It would draw 120 amps. I just need it to be warm enough to cut a foam. I just connect it to a 10 volt supply and raise the voltage.

If needed i just connect this to a zero volt. Supply and raise the voltage as needed one volt. A bit sticky tools start to smoke. Oh.

It is cutting a little bit more maybe three volts. Nice so two double a batteries. I just needed two double a batteries just make sure you use rechargeable batteries. Because running three to four amps through them will discharge them in more than half an hour not too bad then you'll need to recharge them.

Well. I don't have a proper battery holder. But i have some neo medium neodymium magnets that can hold my batteries and wires. Together.

There ready to go will it cut let me see if i can cut a duck out of it my hands are too wobbly for a beautiful artwork. Let's retry. Okay a little bit better this cuts well. And it's safe too something you can do at home.

Okay. Let's make a fuse. A fuse is basically a piece of wire that gets hot and melts open when too much current runs through it let's see at what current it melts. Five amps.
Maybe yeah. No it glows a bit. But no burn seven amps perhaps still no and i don't think real fuses glow. Like that how about 10 amps.

The cab. Now i guess it could be a 10 amp fuse. I keep engraving myself with hot wires. I guess we could make an engraver out of it okay okay so we need to hold the wire.

Somehow with some fire resistance material. A piece of stick maybe i tie. Some copper wire to the end of this wire. Like this tape it to the end of the stick and we have our engraver now we just connect it up and engrave quick.

I need a piece of wood. Oh wood is not fire resistant. I'm thinking we could use some terminal blocks to hold the wires. The good thing about terminal blocks is that they have this big chunk of metal in them.

So it acts like a big thermal mass and it will get warmer much slower than the wire itself. We could take it out of the plastic. Too if it melts later hide. The element and wires the terminal block now we can tape it to the stick because the copper wires won't get warm anymore and now we have a safer engraver and now we can engrave let's start from six amps.

It engraves. Nicely. What maybe six amp is a little bit too much how about five amps yeah. Five amp is nice too.

But the tip of this thing is a little bit too wide. We should make it sharper. There you go much sharper turn it on beautiful in it too much smoke. Though i know we can use the fan.

We harvested from the hair dryer to suck remove the smoke. I just forgot to figure out how it was connected before i cut everything off. There. You go this guy has the schematic.

So the 120 volt line goes through the full bridge rectifier first before feeding the motor. Because it's a dc motor. Fortunately for us the rectifier is already connected to the motor. We just tied the power wires to it and now it's ready my diodes let me just directly connect it to my dc power supply and check something.

Nine volts and all it needs is like 15 volts. If you don't know how something works don't put false information on the web. If i'm not wrong the dc motor was driven through one of the heating elements. So a big portion of the voltage would drop over the element and a small portion of it was driving the motor.

Which makes me think we can make some good power resistors from these for now. We just tape the fan into some pipe that we can vent it out of somewhere it doesn't quite fit. But doesn't matter see due to some fluid dynamic effect. The smoke isn't just sucked into the fan.

It is also sucked from the sides of it into the pipe. So now we can engrave in peace except that we need two power supplies or a single supply with two outputs. The good thing about having supplies is that you can tune the airflow or the temperature of the engraver. Let's make a resistor.
Why should you pay a ton of money to buy a power resistor when you can run 5 amp. Through this wire. No problem you can cut a 1 ohm. Length of it for 25 watts.

Or 10. Ohms. For 250 watts. Here's a 10 ohm 250 watt resistor that can take 5 amps like a champ see well evidently there are two different types of wires in this heating element.

One is much thinner than the other one and melts at much lower current. We could make two different fuses out of them oh well i'm left with around 15 ohms of the thicker wire. Now i just need something to wrap it around not again. Why don't we just wrap it around its own heat resistance core here you go an almost 15.

Ohms. 300. Watts. Resistor.

Let's connect it in series with another hair dryer. Don't try this at home here you go let's switch it on oh. It's heating up already. I guess i can cool it down with the hair dryer.

How much current is it drawing oh stop it see if i connect a line directly to the hair dryer. It runs fast but through the resistor it runs much slower because the resistor limits the current and i bet. If i connect it halfway it runs faster too which brings us back to our potentiometer or variable resistor. I'm going to use my trusty spoon.

As the potentiometer slider and tune the speed of my hair dryer. How much current is it drying the whole thing is fused. It must be over 10 amps. I bet.

If we blew air over our resistor to cool it down we could even run it at higher currents. I guess we already have our high power resistor with the fan set up here. Let's check its resistance. What two mega ohms well it's on but on the lowest setting.

It must be going through the elements that goes through the diode and motor and doesn't show right next setting. 20 ohms next. One 10 ohms on 120 volts is like 1440 watts. That's a ton man just use a hair dryer as your power resistor.

It has multiple resistor settings. A cooling fan and all the safety features already set up while you can use it to dry your hair. If there was any or instead. If you want to learn by making projects.

Then go to my sponsor kirikou. Great project. Assortment with nine different lines covering all ages for kids from zero to 100 years old these are hands on steam projects designed by experts and tested by kids who can enjoy building them with the great instructions. Provided and the additional knowledge and science behind it this looks a bit too technical.

You think you can make it of. Course i can build anything that's my daughter visit kiwicocom. Electroboom to get your first crate any crate at 50 percent off my daughter has been building a few crates now and not only she gets hands on building experience and learns a ton. But also the end products have been quite fun and useful too does it work it works like a charm.

Let me give you a stronger light look at it. It's a light seeking turtle. It's a moth turtle high five. So do your kids a favor sign up using my link and fill up their summer with awesome kiwi co projects.
They can learn a ton from. While having fun gaining the creative confidence they need and thank you for watching.

13 thoughts on “Making 5 things from a broken hair dryer”
  1. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars TimeHunter says:

    That high five was so loud it was like a capacitor exploding! I’m tempted to take more things apart for experiments now.

  2. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Thomas Robinson says:

    The excitement when he goes "You can make a fuse out of this!". This is the epitome of "Turn your failures into successes!"

  3. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars jacob janoski says:

    It sucks the air around it via scavenging, used with car exhuasts to drag exhuast out quicker

  4. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Nicolas Goubin says:

    "if there was any" 😂

  5. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars TwinShards says:

    It's a "Moth" turtle Bhahahaha

  6. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Majestic Centuar says:

    Coincidentally while watching this I got electrocuted by touching the plug prongs on my electric water flosser with wet fingers. It wasn't in the wall anymore… maybe a discharging capacitor?

  7. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Anand Kumar says:

    Electrocute 🙂

  8. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Fossil Fools says:

    He's the electrician version of "fire marshal bill" 🤭

  9. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Anthony Baransky says:

    your funny and smart

  10. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars iSaac🎵 says:

    Now this is edutainment…

  11. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Douglas Delia says:

    The strongest veritasium fanboy vs the weakest electroBOOM connoisseur

  12. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Pep Aroni says:

    What was that jar of stuff you were burning……..😳

  13. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Pyro Jackson says:

    Is it just me or electrocute looks like alexendra botez or andrea botez, whichever looks like her

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