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I am worried about the pneumatic connections being heavy and kind of a pain to undo, especially if they are cold and especially especially if I'm in a hurry to get out of the car in an emergency with gloved hands adding to the complications. I have no experience with the dry breaks, and no experience with water through the pneumatics.
Just wondering aloud.
I'm thinking the quick-disconnects are actually going to have to be held to the tubing by barbed fittings without clamps - so in an emergency egress, you just have to yank. Not sure how well that'll hold water in practice, but it's worth a shot.
I'm thinking the quick-disconnects are actually going to have to be held to the tubing by barbed fittings without clamps - so in an emergency egress, you just have to yank. Not sure how well that'll hold water in practice, but it's worth a shot.
You're overthinking it.
Make the tubing long enough that you can get out of the car with it still attached, if it worries you.
We built one, sort of. I went to Pegasus racing and bought the shirts and the female ends. Since the real shirts have 4 areas that get the cold water evenly vs 1 tube through the whole shirt.
I then got a high efficiency cooler- the kind that can keep ice for 3 days. Then went to the Boat marine place and got a 360 gpm? submersible sump. It was about 20 bucks. They also had the hose and adapters at this place .
I got 16 feet of hose so i can stand next to the car and hook up. I have 8 feet of movement.
I also didnt do any hose disconnects from the cooler, just drilled 2 small holes the size of the tubes near the top so I didnt have to worry about it being 100% water tight. and zip tied the return line on the inside so it would pull back though. The other was connected to the pump.
It worked great. We ran the Chump race at homestead. with the cooler 1/2 way filled with water we still could add 2 bags of ice and it stayed cool for 2 hours on a 90 deg day. photos this weekend when I unpack the car from the trailer.
Since there seems to be a lot of interest on this topic, I decided to start my own venture. Its called CoolShorts. While you are busy keeping your torso icy and comfortable - who's watchin out for your nuggets? For a nominal fee Rooster Juice Enterprises will provide you with tighty whities/size xl underroos with tubing and dry fit connectors for hookup with any cooler system.
Think this can get you cool enough? Every product we sell will be covered by our "Frightened Turtle" moneyback guarantee.
We're pricing individual systems at $40 each, plus shipping and handling for units made from salvaged BVD's or
$50 each for brand new units
Midget sizes available upon request
Since there seems to be a lot of interest on this topic, I decided to start my own venture. Its called CoolShorts. While you are busy keeping your torso icy and comfortable - who's watchin out for your nuggets? For a nominal fee Rooster Juice Enterprises will provide you with tighty whities/size xl underroos with tubing and dry fit connectors for hookup with any cooler system.
Think this can get you cool enough? Every product we sell will be covered by our "Frightened Turtle" moneyback guarantee.
We're pricing individual systems at $40 each, plus shipping and handling for units made from salvaged BVD's or
$50 each for brand new unitsMidget sizes available upon request
Do you take PayPal?
Pneumatic fittings will leak.
Only the female side of this is valved. The male size is open all the time.
They are also heavy.
The part that makes the plastic fittings "dry" breaks are the valves on both the male and female side.
I bought a bunch from Wilson Products, they were not that expensive.
CoolShirt uses slightly different style connectors from FAST.
Additionally, Cool Shirts use barbed fittings with no clamps. FAST shirts are crimped.
As others have said, leave extra hose, bilge pumps are cheap and a larger cooler increases capacity.
Try Dry Ice, what could go wrong?
SUCCESSFUL TEST!!!
The Nomad h2o to go worked perfectly with a bunch of tubing duct taped to my shirt. Plenty of pressure and it was very cool. Literally and figuratively. I did use pneumatic fittings and they did not leak after I got the proper hose clamps. I do suspect that the innards of the female connection will get rusty and cause some problems like they did on an air line I had that got moisture in it.
On the return side, I just ran the tubing from the shirt to a 1/4" hole I drilled in the Nomad's cap. It fit pretty snugly, especially after it had pressure in the hose. In an emergency, I'm thinking it could just be yanked out.
Cheap and very easy since all the plumbing has been done for you. Now, if it is durable...
Your NOMAD idea looks neat becasue it is all pre-assembled. However, the AMAZON link you provided shows that the NOMAD product costs over $200. That is not much of a savings from the real COOL SHIRT system.
Did you say you got yours for $15? Was that used at a yard sale or something?
Your NOMAD idea looks neat becasue it is all pre-assembled. However, the AMAZON link you provided shows that the NOMAD product costs over $200. That is not much of a savings from the real COOL SHIRT system.
Did you say you got yours for $15? Was that used at a yard sale or something?
Thats wierd. The link I posted originally had that for 89 bucks. If you google Nomad h2o on the go, it comes up anywhere from 50 to 75 dollars. I found several of them for 15 bucks at a Sears outlet store in Kansas City. They are brand new.
And yeah, the pre-assembled part was the best thing about it.
As far as the cool shirt part, about 20 bucks in adapters later (I bought more than I ended up needing), I had it all hooked together and keeping me cool. However, I imagine I looked like a dork standing in my driveway with tubes running up my shirt from this weird orange thing hooked into my suburban.
Once the neighbors get used to seeing rusty $#!+cans in your driveway there's no reason to worry about looking like a dork - they've already got you pegged as a potential mullethead.
I did use pneumatic fittings and they did not leak after I got the proper hose clamps.
Must be special connectors cause all my male pneumatic ends for my air lines are open and drain all the air when disconnected.
How do yours work when you disconnect the shirt?
Cool Shirt fittings are valved so at most they drip a couple of times when you disconnect them.
No leaking with the pump running.
TTOD1 wrote:I did use pneumatic fittings and they did not leak after I got the proper hose clamps.
Must be special connectors cause all my male pneumatic ends for my air lines are open and drain all the air when disconnected.
How do yours work when you disconnect the shirt?
Cool Shirt fittings are valved so at most they drip a couple of times when you disconnect them.
No leaking with the pump running.
Actually, no, they are the same as yours. I forgot to say that the hoses, once disconnected, leak out water. I was more concerned with them leaking when they were connected.
I really wasn't too worried about the water leaving the shirt when it wasn't in use because so far, the pump has had no trouble refilling it. Maybe we could clamp the hoses when not in use. I dunno, I was just trying to be cheap.
Here are 45 pics from my real Cool Suit 8qt cooler in my track car and my DIY Cool Suit 28qt cooler for our Lemons car.
http://picasaweb.google.com/ScottBarton … SuitCooler
More pics here http://picasaweb.google.com/ScottBarton … SuitCooler
-Scott
Scott, what did you use to seal up the holes you drilled in that cooler? Did you just use JBWeld to hold the drybreaks in place or is that something else? Thanks.
I still want to see backpack-based cool shirts for crew members. Totally possible! Thrift-store Hello Kitty backpack, motorcycle battery, ice chest, aquarium pump, lots of duct tape.
Any team equipped with such devices will be considered instant Lemons Legends.
I still want to see backpack-based cool shirts for crew members. Totally possible! Thrift-store Hello Kitty backpack, motorcycle battery, ice chest, aquarium pump, lots of duct tape.
Any team equipped with such devices will be considered instant Lemons Legends.
Add a camelbak bladder and crew endurance tends towards infinity.
By the way, did anyone else spot the guy who bypassed the "shirt" part at Summit Point? I walked into the men's room and there's this guy with hose wrapped around and duct taped to his bare flesh.
OK - so I was inspired to make one of these for myself.
A recent track day at a superhot Sears Point clinched it.
I was a little unhappy with the thickness of the nuts on the brass pipe - it left precious little room for the brass compression fitting to fully seat - I had to really teflon tape it up to get a good seal
Plugged it in tonight (wiring's not 100% done) and my wife walked out to the garage with a load of laundry
her: " hey - are these shorts dirty?"
me: " uh yeah - HEY! are you ready for the moment of truth? I am just about to turn the power on for my new cool shirtt (tm) system! Now all my drivers will bask in the coolness provided by refreshing chilled water circulating..."
her: " maybe later" - exits garage to kitchen
... well. At least one of us was excited about it.
All you other Ghetto Gearheads - enjoy the pics below
By the way, did anyone else spot the guy who bypassed the "shirt" part at Summit Point? I walked into the men's room and there's this guy with hose wrapped around and duct taped to his bare flesh.
This. FTW! West Virginia, baby. West Virginia.
Looks great. We're building two cool-seats (swap out the cooler during pit stops) and it helps to see other people's creations.
What type of hose connectors are those? The white ones. I've seen them on equipment I've used in the lab but never knew what they were called. I want to use them in this project.
Our drivers are going to be so spoiled. They'll never want to drive for anyone else.
Just a warning when doing this, we built one for summit, and it worked great, with 2 problems:
1) we used sheet metal to make a baffle in the cooler to prevent our solid frozen milk jugs from bashing into the pump (solid frozen milk jugs worked great, baffle did its job, but duh, of course it rusted in an instant and painted everything rust colored).
2) The milk jugs..... if you do this, and I recommend you do, they stay frozen for a really long time and can be re-frozen fairly quickly since they don't thaw all the way, peel the stickers and wash the outside of the bottle. The disolved sticker goo crudded up our fittings and eventually clogged one of the shirts too.... lesson learned ;-)
dry-break fittings - I ordered the exact part numbers from McMaster-Carr that the original instructions indicated. They worked perfect.
For finishing it up - I intend to use a pack of frozen water bottles with the plastic bulk carrier still attached to the necks so I get a convenient drop in-dropout ice pack. I intend to do some plastic baffling around the pump (to secure that the pump will always have water and to secure the pump in the cooler. I imagined making a u channel of plastic that would line the inside of the cooler. I could secure the pump at the bottom, of the u and then the 2 ends I could screw to the cooler walls.
I didn't want to screw the pump directly to the bottom of the cooler for leak potential minimization.
In retrospect if you want to build this cheaper - I found the brass fittings were a fair part of the cost - you could do cheaper with plastic pipe (think irrigation system).
I found myself extremely pissed at the hardware store trying to find all the necessary fittings to hook this damn thing up - if I did this again - I'd order every part off McMaster - as long as you're sure you know the specs on what you need - they have it
Also - this device requires less actual liquid h2o to function than i origionally anticipated...
If you are using a bilge pump I found it doesn't work very will if it is not covered on the bottom, it agitates the water more then it actually pumps.
Also, I 1/4 inch lines directly from the pump (with adaptors) out the lit of the cooler, then sealed with silicone. No need for fancy pass through fittings, we're talking water here, not acid, and being on the top of the cooler it didn't leak at all.
Silicone sealer on every screw hole kept it from leaking at all. The dry break fittings from mcmaster worked very very well and are simple to install. Also rout the return line so it goes directly into the ice-end of the cooler as well to make it work better. With the exception of the dry breaks, all the fittings needed I found at west marine and home depot.
I used a weather pack connector for the electrical connections so the switch and wiring stay in the car. Wires were also routed through the top of the cooler and sealed with silicone, just remember to leave enough slack in the tubing and wires and you'll be fine.
soft plastic sheet or aluminum flashing/aluminum sheet is fine for the inner baffle, keep it off the bottom so the water can move freely underneath while the baffle will help prevent slosh and keep the block ice/water bottles...etc from moving.
Remember the bigger the block of ice, the longer it will last. We had no issues. The water doesn't need to be super cooled to provide the needed affect, its more about maximizing the tubing surface area in the shirt to provide for as much heat transfer as possible rather then squeezing out a few degrees. We found the big ice containers provided a great balance between cooling and ease of use/changing.
Also, we used a large cooler full of dry ice (luckily I have a connection there) to freeze/re-freeze. I filled it up thursday afternoon before summit and it stayed frozen until sunday morning, of course only open when needed. Water freezes incredibly quickly at around -100 degrees ;-)
Bilge pumps cost money! What's wrong with windshield-washer pumps? Pocket-sized, i.e. free at the junkyard! Yeah, you engineer types will whine about the duty cycle and MTBF gibberish, but how do you know it couldn't pump water for 12 hours straight?
I really want to see a whole team wearing backpack-mounted cool-suit rigs as they wander around the paddock, so much so that I'm willing to hand out a Get Out Of Penalty Box Free card to any team doing so.
I'll load the battery and cooler onto our welding cart - keep the hose lines from the shirt long- do a splitter on the 1/4 pipe, then we can wander around the pits with all of our drivers hooked up to our f'd up "octopus dialysis machine" at once
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