WD-40 Turbo Air Blower Teardown

Using canned air to clean electronics is pretty useful. That is until it runs out. That's where the WD-40 Turbo Air Blower comes in. Or where it should come in I should say. It lacked in performance ever since I got it on Woot many moon ago. For some reason I've held on to it, but I finally decided it's time to tear it apart. Let's do this.


Here it is in all its glory. Standing about 12 inches tall, it's self contained in a nice aluminum body with a single switch on the side and a charging port on the bottom. And, uh, ignore the sticker.

So where do we start, well the only visible screws are in the air intake area which is touch to access. I got to them and unscrewed them but that didn't seem to do anything. Looking closely it looks like it was just to mount the motor to the inner plastic housing.

So how to get the plastic housing removed from the aluminum? Well a little tinder prying and the top came off. After much prodding and prying though, I still was unable to get the inner housing out. So I flipped it over and with some more tender bench vice grips and hacksawing I was able to get the bottom out.

 Immediately removing the bottom and you see the battery pack which is just a 4 cell NimH pack. 

Interestingly, the power wire ran through the middle of the 4 pack of batteries with an open spot in the wires middle to connect them to the battery terminals.

Battery specs.

The cell pack was dead so before tearing it apart too much, I hooked it up to a bench power supply and was able to get a max speed out of about 16 miles per hour. 

So after a lot more tinkering, it appeared the inner plastic housing was pressure fitted inside the aluminum. I trying pushing it out but the aluminum just started bending. Interestingly, it was pretty easy to peel with cutters. So I started peeling.

And peeling and peeling.

Finally the goodies.

I was afraid at first (before removing the housing) that the surface mount switch was taking the entire load of the motor which was a few amps. But they actually did have it set up with a Schottky transistor format. 

The takeaway is that this was just a simple motor with a fan on it. Pretty uninteresting even by my standards. But now I have a nice little motor with a turbine that fits the shaft.