Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/22/restoration-project-1919-mech.html
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Somehow, against all odds, those fan blades do not look like they have claimed any fingers.
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Electrical, not mechanical. Looks cool tho.
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I hope they don’t have kids, or keep the fan out of reach and unplugged. I about lost a finger to one with a similar “guard” - the cut was bad enough to see bone. Bad memories.
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Bet you didn’t do that again, huh.
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While the most of the restoration is really nice, there is one serious mistake. They tinned the coil wires before screwing them to connectors. Over time this may cause increased resistance in the connection due to tin creep and in some cases heat generated at the weakened connection may cause fire.
From Wikipedia:
The practice of tinning stranded wires to facilitate the process of connecting the wire to a screw terminal, though having been prevalent and considered standard practice for quite a while, has been discouraged by professional electricians,[27] owing to the fact that the solder is likely to creep under the pressure exerted on the tinned wire end by the screw of the terminal, causing the joint to lose tension and hence create a loose contact over time. The accepted practice when connecting stranded wire to a screw terminal is to use a wire ferrule on the end of the wire.
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What’s the difference in this context?
Just a couple more times. Never said I was smart.
But really, I was turning the fan off and the switch was on the back so my fingers just kinda slipped into the blades. Ugh.
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While searching the web for help in repairing a much newer old fan, I discovered that there is a respectably-sized fan hobbyist community, and some of the restorations are pretty impressive. (The other thing I learned is that some of the fans I’ve disposed of over the decades I should have held onto.)
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I would envision a hand crank or other type of motivation for a “mechanical” fan. Throw an electrical motor on it and it becomes “electrical”. Which in my opinion, actually makes this rebuild even harder. Trying to rebuild a 100 year old electrical motor is a feat in and of itself.
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Fan fans?
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The annual convention of the Antique Fan Collectors Association is called Fanfair.
In my old apartment, the bathroom had no exhaust fan, so we mounted a restored 1920s fan on the wall in the hallway to get some serious airflow into the bathroom. We ran that thing every day for ten years with only minor maintenance, and it’s still as good as new.
Fans were one of the first consumer goods to be powered by electricity, and the early ones were built to last.
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