One man's trash.......

We used a squirrel cage blower in grade school on a science project for a wind tunnel into which we "flew" model rockets. This was circa 1969 and the furnace guy who sold us the used fan charged us $50.00 which was a small fortune back then. I even found the wind tunnel plans we followed on line (page 13 of the download):

https://estesrockets.com/wp-content/uploads/Educator/2845_Classic_Collection_TR-TN.pdf