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Jan. 6th, 2007 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogA few years ago, not long after moving into our apartment in Michigan, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wooisme and I bought a fan at Target. It was just a little ten dollar desk fan, but I picked it out because it was reminiscent of desk fans from the fifties or forties. The motor housing was shiny brushed chrome, like a vintage Kenmore blender, and the cage around the blades, though it didn't have the big finger-chopping gaps that I love, was an affair of closely spaced metal rings brazed to a few central radiating spokes behind them and had a big round maker's mark in the middle, just like classic GE or Westinghouse models.
The two of us used to run it during the night; we both found out soon into our relationship that neither of us can sleep well without some kind of white noise in the background, so when I forgot to bring my cheap little desk fan with me from my parents' house with me in the little white trailer I hauled behind me when I left Wisconsin, we picked it up as a replacement.
It stopped working a few weeks ago, and that made me a little sad. It really had been a nice fan; most of a similar quality would be significantly more expensive. So, since I found some time today between reading up on how to install MySQL under Windows and working on patching Final Fantasy XI up to the current version (my last log in to the system was in March of last year by the way; shows you how much I play games. Maybe I should just stop paying the account fee....) to start disassembling it in the hope that I could get it running again. I didn't have high hopes, to tell the truth. I was worried that there would be a burned out bearing that I couldn't replace, or that I'd simply lose track of how to put it back together and end up throwing out a bag of random fan parts.
As I took the fan apart, I couldn't help but be impressed. As I noted, the grill and motor casing were metal, not plastic. But I also found that everything else, from the blades in front right down to the little knob in back that you pull or push to engage the oscillation function, is all solid metal. That's really rare to see in a consumer grade home appliance these days.
So I stripped parts until I got all the way in to the guts of the motor itself. It's a neat design; I've never seen a motor with a shaft that protrudes from the front and back (the front part of the shaft attaches to the blades and the rear part ends in a worm gear that interfaces with the oscillation assembly). I found scorch marks on the shaft near where it went through the rear bearing; looking further, it just looked like the lube had migrated out of the interior of the bearing and out the back. So, I just spread it around inside again. I put enough parts back together for the shaft to be stable and turned it on; whoosh! Nice easy spin and the hum of a happily working motor. And then, I even managed to put the thing completely back together and successfully operate it!
Despite having put the grill back on sideways and being too lazy to take it off again and reorient, I'm pretty pleased with myself!
wooisme and I bought a fan at Target. It was just a little ten dollar desk fan, but I picked it out because it was reminiscent of desk fans from the fifties or forties. The motor housing was shiny brushed chrome, like a vintage Kenmore blender, and the cage around the blades, though it didn't have the big finger-chopping gaps that I love, was an affair of closely spaced metal rings brazed to a few central radiating spokes behind them and had a big round maker's mark in the middle, just like classic GE or Westinghouse models.The two of us used to run it during the night; we both found out soon into our relationship that neither of us can sleep well without some kind of white noise in the background, so when I forgot to bring my cheap little desk fan with me from my parents' house with me in the little white trailer I hauled behind me when I left Wisconsin, we picked it up as a replacement.
It stopped working a few weeks ago, and that made me a little sad. It really had been a nice fan; most of a similar quality would be significantly more expensive. So, since I found some time today between reading up on how to install MySQL under Windows and working on patching Final Fantasy XI up to the current version (my last log in to the system was in March of last year by the way; shows you how much I play games. Maybe I should just stop paying the account fee....) to start disassembling it in the hope that I could get it running again. I didn't have high hopes, to tell the truth. I was worried that there would be a burned out bearing that I couldn't replace, or that I'd simply lose track of how to put it back together and end up throwing out a bag of random fan parts.
As I took the fan apart, I couldn't help but be impressed. As I noted, the grill and motor casing were metal, not plastic. But I also found that everything else, from the blades in front right down to the little knob in back that you pull or push to engage the oscillation function, is all solid metal. That's really rare to see in a consumer grade home appliance these days.
So I stripped parts until I got all the way in to the guts of the motor itself. It's a neat design; I've never seen a motor with a shaft that protrudes from the front and back (the front part of the shaft attaches to the blades and the rear part ends in a worm gear that interfaces with the oscillation assembly). I found scorch marks on the shaft near where it went through the rear bearing; looking further, it just looked like the lube had migrated out of the interior of the bearing and out the back. So, I just spread it around inside again. I put enough parts back together for the shaft to be stable and turned it on; whoosh! Nice easy spin and the hum of a happily working motor. And then, I even managed to put the thing completely back together and successfully operate it!
Despite having put the grill back on sideways and being too lazy to take it off again and reorient, I'm pretty pleased with myself!
