The Tornado In a Box

BWAHahahahahaha! We're making SCIENCE!!!!

We got to play around with cutting glass for this. It's possible to cut tempered glass... But it's kinda tricky. Colt did all the important cuts because I lack the combination of dexterity and patience to get it right. I still like to think I helped with moral support ^_^. I nearly totalled a pain of mirrors.

The idea of a tornado box is simple: get air to come into the box from directions tangental to the desired vortex. In other words, make the air come into the box from angles that would encourage rotating air. Lemme draw a small diagram:

The Green lines represent air current.

Blue lines are glass(or mirrors). Notice how they're set up slightly off from each other?
Black is just the wooden box frame

In order to encourage air to want to enter the box: we put a lid on top of the glass and cut a large hole through the top. We then fit an old 12v projector fan on top of the hole and bolted the fan down.

The lid for the tornado box didn't get finished in our OHN night, but it is now done and shots will be posted of it in use during our next party. Unfortunately I didn't think to take pictures while we were still playing with the dry ice. DOH!

Actually, we got photos while we were "playing" with the dry ice. We made some "boo" bubbles with some bubble blowing solution, we super carbonated soda and just made fog with warm water. The photos aren't in our dropbox though :P

Meh.

ALSO: Super-mega-ultra props to Ferret for building that sweet glowing blue "meh" sign you see in the BG.