Wilcox Engineering

After building a few kits, I eventually decided that breathing fumes from my soldering was not especially healthy. There are a number of commercial fume-extraction systems on the market, but why buy when the parts are already in the shop?

I already had an old 110 vac muffin fan that I had used for cooling an old tube-type transmitter years ago. A quick trip to the local Lowes store for some ducting material, a plastic box from K-Mart, and I was ready to build.

The vent has an elbow that pulls air in from whatever I'm working on at the moment. The current version, not shown here, connects to a small airbox that I put the circuit board on top of. The fumes get pulled down from the circuit and swept away.

The fan is in a kitchen food-storage box. Notice on the right side that I have charcoal filter material to cleanup the fumes before returning the air to the shop.