DIY Fume Extractor

Important Note

Despite what I titled this back in 2009, this is not a fume extractor. It is useful for keeping solder fumes away from your face, making it less likely that you will inhale them (or at least as much), but it is not a fume extractor. The carbon filter is useful for filtering odors and may trap some of the flux particles but to actually be truly effective at extracting, you need to use a HEPA type filter. With this caveat, I still think this is useful for keeping fumes away from your face but you should always work in a well ventilated area and/or use a true HEPA filter. I’m keeping this post here for historical purposes.

Oringial Post

I was tired of breathing solder fumes so I decided to make myself a fume extractor – in its simplest form a fume extractor sucks the soldering fumes up and passes them through a filter, in this case I used and activated carbon filter.

You can buy fume extractors from anywhere $30 to thousands but since I already had everything to make this (except the carbon filters and the tin) I decided to go the DIY route. The filters were $11 for a big roll (enough to cut a few dozen filters for this) and $3 for the tin.