It was an early fall day in 1999. Tom Smith, Sam Corbett, and myself (Dylan Flipse) were roadtripping to Boston for a Moxy Früvous concert. With us was the 486-33 laptop that Sam and I had purchased for $25 at auction. The battery was shot, of course, and we had no car power converter. A little way into our trip, we stopped at a Kmart and picked up a car power adapter meant for powering CD players. We also snagged a roll of masking tape, which we intended for the flipse.com signs you can see in some of the windows.
Sam had previously installed Win3.1 on the laptop and we brought it along because, hey, everyone loves a good game of solitaire. We plugged the converter into the cigarette lighter and into the laptop's power supply, fiddled with switches, the laptop powered on...for about a minute. Quicky discovered that we'd blown a fuse in our newly-purchased converter. Shorting that with the metal from a twistie tie that was sitting around the Space Van, we were back in the game for several minutes, until the whole little unit overheated and stopped working. The convertor is rated at 0.5amps and the laptop uses right around 2amps, so we were trying to use cheap electronics to do 4X what they were designed for. What did we need? Some hardcore cooling.
Here we see Tom, who has cracked open the case of the converter, giving us direct access to what we want to cool. Now, we're in a van, on an interstate, already running late, so we can't stop by any hardware stores or anything, but we're resourceful.
One thing we had on hand was plenty of soda. We also had the aforementioned masking tape, and a nice air conditioner. Hmmmmm. We started drinking the soda. In large quantities. (This lead to quite a few more pit stops than we'd planned on, making us later still.)
Tom started cutting the tops and bottoms off the cans so they could be formed into a ducting system from the air conditioner down to where the cigarette lighter is.
With guidance from Sam and I, Tom started forming the ductwork.
This was the first attempt, it had a few problems. A good volume of air would shoot out of that Coke can you see, but very little made it out of the Sprite can. Inefficient design. Also, you see that other vents are uncovered, and some air pressure was being lost that way.
But we got it figured out eventually. This was actually a very tight design. We sealed off other vents, made sure there were no leaks in our ducts, and also designed the corners of the ducts to let air flow as freely as possible. The results were really amazing. The exposed metal surface of the power converter that before had gotten hot enough to burn after a minute of use was now very, very cold to the touch.
Our sweet reward (Well, their sweet reward, really, I was driving.) was a very quality game of solitaire.
Then things got silly...started giving away the raw materials to random passing motorists. (Though this guy did email me later, said he'd seen the Flipse.com signs, thanked me for the Sprite.) Don't try this at home, mom is never happy when you drive your car at highway speeds through the living room.
After doing all that duct work (Can't believe we didn't actually have duct tape, this is the one time in my life that I would have used it for its intended purpose.), Sam just started getting crazy with that tape.
