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Project: Fan Shirt
Date: Summer 2002

Summary:

This project was made specifically for Burningman 2002. It was completed in just a few days. There were three driving factors behind making this vest.

1. Burningman is really hot, this might help me keep cool
2. I was already working with fan art
3. I had a bunch of glow stuff to wear at night, but nothing electronic for the day

This project consists of just a few simple parts.

• 18 large fans
• 20 small fans
• locking power connector from a old RAID storage device
• 2 6V lantern batteries in series

Besides getting lots of compliments, on what seemed to be a first for burningman a few other results came of this outfit. The Center Camp Cafe gave me a free ice coffee, because the liked the fan shirt so much. Wendy and I had problems riding our art vehicle together because my fan shirt would scrap her chest. Several people asked to have photographs of it, and see the fans spin. It wasn't until late in the summer of 2003 did I change the battery pack. I had been using four nine-volts in parallel. This configuration was silly. The 9Vs would stop spinning the fans after ten minutes. I switched over to a 12V configuration using two large lantern batteries, which were capable of spinning the fans for hours on end.