Some old websites preserve important standards or vanished software. This one preserves a man building a jet engine because his beer was too warm.
Visit the Jet Powered Beer Cooler
Simon Jansen’s page dates the project to 2001, and the premise is laid out with the kind of clarity modern product teams spend three meetings trying to achieve: an all-day session in the shed requires beer, and warm beer is unacceptable.
Ice was apparently insufficient. Refrigeration was apparently too ordinary. Jansen remembered that an expanding liquid draws heat from its surroundings, looked at an LPG cylinder, and arrived at the obvious next step.
Burn the gas through a homemade jet engine.
Extremely unnecessary engineering
The engine used a car turbocharger for the compressor and turbine, with a homemade combustor completing the arrangement. Jansen then used the rapid LPG consumption to chill the cylinder sitting in water with the beer cans.
According to the page, the engine could run up to 100,000 RPM, with exhaust temperatures around 500°C and noise above 125 dBA. After roughly five minutes, the beer went from 11°C to 2°C.
There was also a PVC pipe involved at one point.
It went badly.
The page became popular enough to hit Slashdot in July 2001, prompting Jansen to add a few notes for the sudden audience. They include a recommendation against using the same technology to cool an overclocked AMD processor and the compact update: “Sorry Mum.”
This is exactly the kind of thing the personal Web was good at. A person had an idea, documented the build, took pictures, wrote down what failed, and published it without first determining whether it had a scalable market.
Was it essential knowledge? No.
Was it useful engineering documentation mixed with personality, photographs, physics, and glorious misuse of workshop equipment? Absolutely.
The broader CacheRat Ancient Web list contains 1,967 sites from this same archaeological dig: serious references, technical archives, personal obsessions, and pages that mostly exist because somebody thought the Internet needed them.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
The cooler page is still online, complete with the warnings, measurements, bad PVC decision, and plans for an afterburner/sausage sizzler.