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Funny that you should mention that exhaust fan, Randy. I gave that fan a little clean up today and noticed that the blades and housing were caked in paint. Evidently whoever was using it never managed to blow themselves up with a spark from the fan, or if they did it didn't leave any scorch marks. :shocked: When you were painting, did you have the fan set to blow into the booth or suck out? If the latter, did you have any concerns about sparking a fire in the paint vapor with the fan?
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Started work on a holder for the lint filter. Had some welding rod laying round, and am trying ring terminals to secure the ends. Probably end up re-doing it with welded on washers, but this was worth a quick try. Still need to find a piece of plywood to lay over the filter, but I don't feel like digging around in the wood pile when it's 97F outside.
I also found the source of the vibration. Runout on the motor shaft was only 0.010", not nearly enough to cause the wobble I was seeing. Really happy about that, as trying to straighten that 1/2" steel shaft would have been a lot of fun! A couple of years ago I was having a heck of a time balancing a ceiling fan, and after weighing the blades discovered that they were all within a few grams of each other. But when I looked at them edge on, none were spinning in the same plane. Once I shimmed them, the wobble went away. So I set up the fan blades with a pointer out toward the end and they were about a half inch out of plane. A little bending and the wobble is almost gone.
I also found out how they got bent:
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Something got caught in that fan sometime in the distant past, and I bet it made a heck of a noise! Kind of a crappy braze job, but it looks strong enough. It's probably what's causing the rest of the vibration.:laughing:
