Fan Repair

Power tools at the ready. Didn't use the torch on this project.

We have a floor fan, i.e. a fan mounted on a pedestal that we got as a wedding present umpteen years ago. My wife drug it out the other day, probably something to do with the weather getting a little warmer, turned it on and it wouldn't go. Seems the bearings are gummed up. The fan will turn, but it takes more effort than the motor can deliver. This should be easy enough to fix. It's a simple electro-mechanical device put together with screws. I should be able to disassemble it, clean and oil and bearings and we should be as good as new. Hah. Foolish man. Three days later I finally completed this supposedly trivial task.

Front motor housing with stator

Disassembly goes well until I go to pull the knob that engages the oscillating mechanism. It looks like there is a Phillips head screw holding the knob on but no amount of force will convince it to turn. Fine, I'll drill out the screw head. That'll get the knob off and we'll worry about how to reattach it later. If I have a left-hand twist drill bit that would be better, as at some point the screw may give up and the drill, instead of cutting into the screw head will snag it and it will unscrew. Surprisingly I do have such a bit (where did that come from?), but it doesn't help. The bit cuts almost all the way through the screw head before it goes off center and destroys the knob. Well, we got the knob off, we can now proceed with the disassembly. But look: there was no screw. The screw head was simply a flare on the end of the shaft. We've seen things like this before on things made in China. They have made a copy of an American design, but they found a short cut that enabled them to use fewer pieces, but because they are making a copy, they make the copy look just like the original, including screw heads for screws that are no longer there.

Small parts. Left hand screw in jaws of Vise-Grips

The next hiccup is the screw holding the link to the oscillating crank. The screw head looks just like most of the other screws holding the motor together, but it won't come out. I end up using the left-hand twist drill bit on this one as well, but I still need to get the screw out of the hole. There is enough of the screw sticking out of the other end that I can grip it with Vise-Grips, but even with the head gone, it won't turn. Then I get the idea that maybe if I try tightening it a bit it will break free and then it will unscrew. Tightening it does break it free because it is a left hand thread!

Rear motor housing with oscillator, crank and the wrong screw

The rest of the motor comes apart easily. I clean and oil the bearings and start reassembly. Now I need to reattach the link to the oscillating crank. You might know where to find a left-hand thread screw of the correct size, but I sure don't, so I pick a likely looking sheet metal screw and use it. The arm is diecast so it goes in easily. But now I think that maybe I should do something to ensure that it won't unscrew, after all the people who originally built it went to the trouble to use a left hand screw here for that reason, and if this fan is going to run for another umpteen months, we don't want this screw backing out.

Gluing broken crank arm back together

So I pick up a center punch. I figure I could punch the side of the arm and it would distort the metal enough to solidly grip the screw and prevent it from ever turning. But when I hit the punch with a hammer, it cracks the arm in two right across the screw hole. Bah! Double bah. Triple humbug.

Oh well, time to break out the epoxy. Glue the end of the arm back on, along with the screw. Wrap some picture hanging wire around the arm to hold it together. As long as it doesn't get in any fights it should be fine.

The green wire has broken free

Green wire soldered back in place

One wire popped off of the switch and I soldered it back on. One of the feet has been coming off for years, a little silicon sealer secured that. I filed down the jagged end of the oscillator control. If I ever want to disengage it I can grip it with Vise-Grips.

This whole exercise makes me wonder which way is up. I don't imagine this fan cost more that $20 when it was new. Of course that was long ago enough that $20 was still real money. You can buy a similar item from Amazon or Ebay for about $30 now. I spent a couple hours working on this, triple that if you count all the time I spent looking for bits and pieces, so economically it doesn't make any sense, unless my time is worth nothing, which it apparently is. I mean who would hire someone who would spend hours trying to fix a cheap fan? But I am rather pleased that I got it running again, even though the oscillator control is not quite so easy to operate.

Update: Peter Grant has a related post.

Borderliner

Borderliner - Grenseland - Trailer
Started another European murder-mystery series this weekend. This one is a little different in that every episode adds a new twist to the story. We've watched about half and now we're starting to suspect even the most upright characters of being conniving, murderous scumbags. The lead character is gay but the actor is nominally straight. I cannot imagine playing that roll. For me that would be well nigh impossible.

Set in Norway, on Netflix.

Update February 2019 replaced missing video.

Why does a motorcycle turn when leaned over?

ISLE of MAN TT ( 2160p 4K) ✔️ THE GREATEST ✔️ Show On Earth ⚡️ ✅ 322.km/h-200.MPH Street Race .DOT45Because I couldn't find a good counter-steer video, and we really can't have a post about motorcycles without a video, can we?

This question popped up on Quora this morning and it made me think, so I've copied my response for your amusement. Some of the other answers mentioned counter-steer, so I included my take on that subject as well.

Q: Why does a motorcycle turn when leaned over?

A: Good question. It doesn’t actually. You can lean a bike over and keep going in a straight line, but you need to shift your weight in the opposite direction to keep it balanced. But you are asking about turning, so this doesn’t matter.
I suspect that leaning and turning go together because of the profile of the tire. The outer edges of the tires are smaller in diameter than the center. When you are riding straight up the tires act like a cylinder and so roll straight ahead, like a can rolling across a table. When you lean the bike over, the tire becomes more like a cone and so it starts rolling in a circle, kind of like a funnel rolling across a table top.
I road for several years before I discovered the trick of opposite steer. Not sure how I managed to get around corners before that. In any case, you don’t actually move the bars, all you need to do to turn right is to push on the right hand handlebar. If you are traveling at any speed, like 30 MPH or better, the bar won’t actually move, but the effect of pushing on the handlebar is instantaneous and you will go zooming off to the right.
What is happening is the gyroscopic action of the front wheel is reacting to the pressure of your hand and pushing the bike over, which makes the wheels turn into cones which makes your bike follow the curve of the road.

Update January 2022 replaced missing video.

Update May 2023 replaced missing video. Previous video was taken down with this message:

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Isle of Man Government Department for Enterprise

The title of the new video is near identical to the last one including all the stupid icons, and it seems to be the same video, so WTF?

 

Jeremy "More Power" Clarkson

Jeremy "More Power" Clarkson

The post isn't about Jeremy Clarkson. It's just that I needed a title, "More Power" seemed appropriate, but I can't say "More Power" without thinking of Jeremy Clarkson, so there we have it.

Piper Twin Commanche

I'm sitting here in the backyard, taking it easy after a hard day of being retired. I'm sitting here and every few minutes a small airplane flies over. Not too surprising, we live about a mile from the Hillsboro Airport, the second busiest airport in Oregon, not that that's saying much since there is only one real-international-fly-anywhere-in-the-world airport in Oregon: PDX.

Anyway, these small planes are flying over and they are making noise, as small planes are want (wont?) to do. And I'm thinking these guys are really struggling. They have the biggest engine they can afford / that the plane can carry, the engine is working as hard as it can, and they can't afford the loss of power and lift that carrying a decent muffler would cost them.


3.0-Liter V6 Twin-Turbo 400-HP Engine | INFINITI Q60 Coupe | INFINITI USA
What we need is a better engine. Maybe we should be using automobile engines. Automobile engines are getting crazy powerful these days. 300 horsepower out of small displacement V-6 is common. But we don't need 300 horsepower, we have that in existing Continental and Lycoming engines. What we need is 1,000 horsepower. No, make that 2,000. You can never have too much power.

Why should you need that much power in an airplane? Cars can go just as fast as small planes, and they generally have more power (200 vs. 100 HP). Because we are taking a big step up. 500 MPH is not just 5 times as fast as 100 MPH, it's 100 times as fierce. It's like the difference between chucking rocks at beer cans in your backyard and hitting a watermelon at a thousand yards with high-powered rifle.

Now I'm wondering why piston engines for airplanes have stagnated. Jet engines certainly haven't. And then I realized that the decision to pursue jet engines was made by the military and the military wanted speed and power, hang the cost. They didn't want to be distracted by two different engine development programs. They went with the one that promised the most power the soonest.

Spitfire Merlin engine replacement*

So what's the difference between a Merlin V-12 that was used in a Spitfire and a modern 1,000 HP conventional reciprocating engine? I suspect there isn't any one thing you could put your finger on, rather it's anything you touch. Everything is different, subtly, you wouldn't notice anything if you weren't intimately involved with the design. Oil, materials, machine techniques, just everything, but the end result is that a new 1,000 HP engine would weigh a fourth of what a Merlin weighs. (Okay, that might be pushing it. If anyone knows different, let me know.)

African Homebuilt Airplane

There are some people in home-built, experimental airplane circles who have been putting automobile engines in airplanes with mostly positive results, but commercially the small airplane industry is stuck in 1950. If it wasn't for the FAA, there would be more progress in aviation. So maybe the answer is to go someplace where the FAA isn't. Africa, I'm looking at you. Here's your chance to build your own FAA, one that isn't bogged down in bureaucratic bullshit. You could be a force in the airplane world. Yeah, right. Fat chance of Africa ever managing to get their shit together.

But maybe that's the way of future, total government incompetence, who you trust based entirely on rumor because nothing you hear from the media can be trusted. So you buy your car / house / airplane based on what the guy at the gas station said, and the only products that succeed are the ones from giant corporations that can afford a massive guerrilla marketing campaign.

Okay, I got a little distracted. The point I was trying to get to is why are propellers so large? A 100 hp engine swings a propeller that is as large in diameter as a good size jet engine. The one thing I hear when I ask this question is 'efficiency'. Well, screw efficiency, what we want is more power. The speeds modern car engines are like the speeds that jet engines turn than the prop speed of a 1000 HP Merlin. Maybe what we need is a small, high speed fan connected directly to a high speed engine. You are going to need some duct work since the blast from the small diameter will be directed directly at the engine. You might be able to generate enough thrust just from the suction, but it would be nice if you got a kick from the blast as well. Directing it at the engine will ensure that it is wasted. It might not be as efficient as a propeller, and it would require some fancy ductwork, but you wouldn't need the speed reducer, a heavy thing that might break.

Pratt & Whitney Speed Reducer
Looks remarkably like the ones used in WW2 radial aircraft engines

On the other hand, Pratt & Whitney is stuffing their old WWII speed reducers in a jet engine in order to lower the speed on the fan. Or maybe we go electric: engine drives generator, generator drives motor. No gears. No mechanical connection except for a couple of fat cables. Works like magic.

Of course if we really knew what we were doing, we would be using electric power to push the air past airplane directly through some kind of magically, subatomic, quantum mumbo-jumbo.

*this picture only exists inside of a search engine. I got it from Google, who claims it comes from Pinterest, but Pinterest claims it came from Google.

Willie's Reserve

Mary J. Wanna

Willie Nelson has gotten into the pot business selling his own line of get-high material. Here's a map of locations that sell their stuff.

Willie's Retailers

Kind of interesting that there is nothing east of Colorado and certainly nothing in Texas, Willie's home. I suspect that the mob is more thoroughly entrenched in the east and they are exerting all of their considerable political power to protect their black market business interests.

Via Iaman.

Factfulness

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

What we have here is a crusader crusading against ignorance. An admirable quest and it might eventually have some effect on the enormous amount of stupidity that currently blankets the world.

He starts (from the excerpt) by talking about the gap instinct:

I’m  talking  about  that  irresistible  temptation  we  have  to  divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap —a huge chasm of injustice— in between.

A huge chasm of injustice? That sounds like SJW (Social Justice Warrior) bullshit. A huge gap in knowledge and understanding, or a huge gap in social evolution maybe. Whatever, remove the irritating phrase "—a huge chasm of injustice—" and the statement is fine. We do tend to divide the world into two camps.

However, he just uses this as an example to show that what we decide is often based on incorrect information. One common division we make is between Western Civilization and the rest of the world, the uncivilized heathen. How do you classify a country as being good or bad? One way is by comparing infant mortality. Here's one chart:

Children and Survival

Looks pretty clear cut, all the heathen are living in the big box, all the good Christians are in the small box. But then he shows us another chart.

Children and Survival 2017

Not so clear cut anymore, is it? Problem is that the first graph is from 1965 and since then the world has changed and it has changed for the better. I suspect this may be why we have so many SJW's running around protesting about nonsense. They don't have any real issues to fight against, but they are still people and they still want a cause to believe in. If the leaders of the pack can't provide them with a worthwhile cause, they'll invent one of their own from whatever they find lying around.

Via Uniberp

Pressing On

Pressing On: The Letterpress Film - Official Documentary Movie Trailer
The rate at which old mechanical technology is being discarded is a little distressing.

I like books and newspapers. They don't require any technological connections in order to use them. Okay, I need my reading glasses, but they don't require any electrical power or batteries or a billion dollar semi-conductor factory to make them.

Being as printing presses are made or iron and steel, they do require the steel-making industry which you might argue was as big in its time as the semi-conductor industry is now.

Books and newspapers are essentially disposable. Yes, you can hold onto a book for years and some books have been around for centuries. Our on-line empire is stored in server farms which are very robust as the data is duplicated on several sites, but the reliability of that storage depends on the robustness of the organization storing the data. Infect an organization with a mental disease and all the data they are safeguarding is sudden at risk of disappearing. And it wouldn't have to be an actual medical disease, it could just be a change in attitude or a new belief, kind of like the way corruption infects some organizations.

The above video is a trailer for the film which has only been shown a few dozen times. I wonder whether they used real film to make the movie, or whether it is entirely a digital creation.

Via Indy Tom.

P.S. My Internet connection was down for at least five hours this morning. It was surprising how annoying that was.