Staying cool on the WR&N IV

It can get mighty hot in the apartments above JB's Corner Bar. Some folks can't afford air conditioners, so they have to make do with window fans. There's one in the third-floor window to the left of the fire escape, and if you've got a sharp eye, you'd see that it's running.

There's nothing really fancy about the mechanism—it's just a micro gearhead motor with three thin slices of styrene rod glued right to the end of the motor shaft and painted white. The fan blades fit inside a strip styrene box that's painted pale blue; the grille is scavenged from an etched brass diesel detail and painted white. And everything fits within the bottom half of a modified Grandt Line window.

 
The fan box is attached directly to the motor gearhead case using a block of styrene to maintain precise alignment with the fan blades, as the tolerances are pretty tight. The whole mechanism (bottom image) can be removed from the building for maintenance (as a rule, I do not permanently install motorized mechanisms in structures if at all possible); it drops into styrene slots bonded to the wall interior. The structure might be recognized as a modified Con-Cor corner pharmacy kit.

Image specs: These images were captured with a Canon 20D digital SLR and a 50mm prime lens. The close-up of the fan in the window was made using a 68mm extension tube.

See the fan in action! | Watch it on YouTube

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