I have decided to use of all things a hair dryer. Supersonic fan cfms. The fan really looks awesome after taking it apart. Now off to get it to run.

Some more pics.

Good luck with that, I don’t think the style of motor used in a hair dryer is intended for continuous duty just sporadic use for a few minutes at a time. I think they are rated for something like 200 or 300 hours before they die, nothing like computer style fans. I found a web page that somebody rated them at around 90 CFM but don’t know if they knew what was what or not. If that’s the case though 120mm fans would be the way to go, the same or more cfm.

Plus I remember everybody that was complaining about the latest and greatest CPU fan/heat sink combo would always compare it to a hair dryer if they thought it was too loud.

They do look cool though, put a big bright blue LED on it

Be careful with that thing!!

It looks to me like it's a low voltage DC motor powered by an AC source of unknown voltage.

I'd say it was. Cold Steel had sparks a flying.
I hooked up the two leads to the AC cord and plugged it in. It had the GFC plug in still in use so I left it attached. I tied the leads to the correct side (hot side- neutral side) according to the attachment of the wire in relation to the color of wire. I am extremely careful about using electricity as anyone should.
The fan jumped to a fast whirrr and It knocked my main breaker instead of the GFC plugin.I guess it's ground fault only like it's supposed to be. Anyhow it blew my plug in. So I got on the web and checked out the diodes attached to the motor. I thought it might be a diode to change the AC to DC attached to the motor so I fix my plug in and plug the fan in once again. And poof it goes. Good thing I got my shades on. So that plug in didn't blow but the next one in the series toward the breaker blew. I had the wires in the pushin holes on the back of the plug in and it blew on the spring clip holder. After replacing that plugin I am now thinking about doing some more trials later if I can find another abandoned hair dryer.

I will try this again but maybe with dc power. I am thinking I could cut the diodes off of the motor and then it should run straight out on DC. I removed the fan motor and looked for any markings to tell me if it is an AC or DC motor. It had none.
Here is a picture of the removed motor which is no longer usable because I bent the shaft getting the plastic fan off.
I was hoping to use the fan speeds switch but it runs through the heating wire for resistance to slow it down so It isn't possible unless I add some type of resistor.

jeez thats a low voltage (<20v ish) dc motor your're trying to run on 110vac
no wonder it blew the breaker

edit: the diodes are there to transform the AC into DC, so running it off AC (or DC) is ok
However, in it's original app the heating elements (resistors) and motor are wired so that the motor only sees a tiny fraction of the full mains voltage
You should try running it on 5v or so to begin with, seems to me it would be safer too

I'm guessing that probably would have been a very noisy fan to use anyway.

I figured it would be noisy but with 2 fans running in the pj it couldn't be much louder unless you run the fan on high. I was trying to use a lower fan speed thus causing excellent air flow with less noise. I have access to a cfm air volume gauge to see how much air it does move. I figure it would be much more than 100cfm.
I'm still trying to locate another free hair dryer so I won't be out any money for another fried fan motor.


MichaelJ I'll try a much lower voltage next time.

poor mans bridge rectifier