MIMF

All, I need some help brainstorming the best way to make a confetti blower. The elementary school is having their big talent show Friday night. The dad’s do an act at the end and this year we want to rain confetti (really just small rectangles of tissue paper) down on the kids in the audience. I attached a 2 1/2” dust collector hose to my leaf blower and fabricated a nozzle with a venturi on the end. The venturi hose pulls the confetti up to the nozzle to mix with the air rushing by. Everything works quite well. But. . . Last night we had acces to the stage for the first time and the only place we can put the blower and still hit the crowd is in a place where we can’t really isolate the noise of the blower. We did the best we can and it will be workable but a bit distracting to the audience; so it is not ideal.

One of the dad’s replaced his furnace recently so I have the squirrel cage and motor. I can figure out how to connect the exhaust side to some 4” or 6” hose but I’m not sure how to inject the confetti. We want a constant supply of confetti for about 2 1/2 mins. So we can’f Just load the hose and have it all come out at once. I can’t feed it into the intake side because the peices are too big to go through the squirrel cage and they end up sticking to the blades.

Is there a way to feed material into the exhaust side without it just blowing back out the way it came? We can have one of us constantly feeding it so it doesn’t have to be self sustaining.

Can you not make also a ventury? Or the air speed is not high enough.

I haven’t tried yet. I’m assuming the air speed will be too slow to give me much pull. I’ll certainly try though.

Just brainstorming:
If you have a compressor that you can place away where the noise will not be a problem, you could make some kind of "injector' that would push the confetti in the blower air stream

I just tried a makeshift venturi on a 4” pipe with what I had on hand. I could not generate any real vaccum at all. The air movement was so slight Innthe venturi tube I couldn’t be sure it was pulling air at all.

The good news is that it wasn’t blowing air out of the tube. The tube is too small for the paper to be gravity fed but maybe I could make a larger tube and funnel without air going the wrong way.?.

This would take absolutely all of the fun out of making it yourself, but given the tight time frame... apparently party rental places rent this sort of thing - if the Dad-skit budget allows, might be a quick fix.

I hear you JC. We probably should have done that from the get go but I thought I had the solution nailed. Sadly, we are already at about twice the budget we typically spend on the act so I'm not sure a last min. rental would fly. I think the vote wold be to go with what we have.

I tried another larger feed tube last night and was able to get a workable gravity feed but it dramatically reduced the distance that the material would travel. I'll have access to the stage again tonight so I'll try it in situ tests.

Another question. So far my tests have been with a 4 inch pipe because that is what I had on hand. I blocked the out feed to only have a 4 inch diameter opening. This obviously restricted air movement. I could get some 6 inch or 8 inch duct pipe tonight to increase flow. Would that 1) increase the distance I could throw the paper pieces 2) would I need to redesign the pipe I am feeding into or could I keep that basically the same?

You may need an auger to deliver confetti. Perhaps an automated pet feeder with a gravity hopper and a kibble conveyer belt. I'd rent a 12" axial blower with the 12" diameter flex hose for your air supply. To push air way out into the crowd you need velocity and laminar airflow to keep the confetti in suspension for as long as possible.
When I need a novel design for something I always start with a patent search since you know at least a thousand people have tried to do this before.

That auger idea is so good, I wish I had thought of it.

a conveyor of some sort may be an alternative to the auger

Or a fabric bag with someone "Fluffing it up"
Like a leaf blower/vacuum in reverse

if you have a small dust collector you could cut a hole in the collector bag and tie it around a 4 inch flexible hose that you could direct to where you want the confetti. You could feed the confetti into the dust collector using the 4" infeed hose (that normally goes to the machine) from a confetti filled bucket or trash can. After you are done you could repair the bag and vacuum up the mess you made.

(A less radical solution might be to sew a "skirt" to attach the hose to the collector and not cut a hole in the collector bag.)

Update: I was underwhelmed by the way it was working with the 4 inch pipe. Tonight, I stopped by the borg and picked up some 8” duct and an elbow. I rolled up some aluminum to make an intake pipe about 2” in diameter and put it in the duct like a venturi it no restriction right before so it barely prodoces any suction but enough to make it easy to feed paper in from the side of the stage. I forgot to take a picture before o dropped it off. It I’ll post one when I get back up to the school.