Build Your Own DIY AC – A reader’s guide

As McGuyver (or MacGruber) can teach us, there’s a lot of things you can build with duct tape and a bunch of “readily available materials” — bombs, crystal meth, and as it turns out, a super-cheap alternative to that $600 window AC unit. Perhaps afraid of ending up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Manolith only commissioned us to draw up this last one:

Manolith: Build Your Own DIY AC

For source material, we cribbed heavily from Geoffrey Milburn’s garage experiments.

Geoff's original design setup

But as we were researching, we discovered that he had inspired a whole community of duct tape designers who came up with some pretty awesome concepts.

Spencer's design, using a '74 Triumph Spitfire radiator

A closed-loop system, using a fishtank water pump

And finally, Geoff’s final design (the “Black Beauty”) was pretty impressive.

The Black Beauty

But despite all the technological progress and innovation on display, ultimately we decided to stay pretty true to the original intent of the project — as you can see from Dan’s original concept sketch.

Dan's original concept sketch

Outside of the copper tubing and some bags of ice, there’s very little shopping (or even boring details like planning or measuring) necessary to produce the unit, which is its genius in the first place.