A friend recently gave me two centrifugal fans and I want to make an electric blowers with them but I don't know where to start. I've looked around here but I can't find anything on the topic. All I have are the motors with the two wires (pos. & neg.) sticking out. I was thinking about maybe using a variable light switch to increase/decrease the speech at which the fan rotates but I don't know how to do that nor do I know how to actually power it: what to connect how to connect, etc. I'm trying to melt some copper and silver to cast a couple of rings but with the old "blower" I had, it didn't work (it was a hair dryer duct taped to the end of a pipe that was stuck into the ground into the forge). Can anyone give me any advice? I would also like to have a pipe attached to the blower with a container or something on top of the end of the pipe to hold the coals and the metals.

Have you been over to http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?4-Metalcasting-forums   a series of forums dedicated to the hobbyiest melting and casting of metals?

Hi, Amolith. There are a number of good posts about making blowers with fans, so I'd recommend doing some more research and seeing what answers have already been given. Pro tip: ignore the forum's native search function, which is no good. Instead, do a google search using "iforgeiron.com" as one of your search terms. I just did such a search with "squirrel cage blower" as the other term and got a dozen hits right away.

I found this website on a post quoting another post. Thank you for the search method suggestion, JHCC!

Squirrel Motor Blower