Desk Fan Repair

we have a pedestal/desk fan that has been stored in spare room since we moved house a year ago, during the recent hot spring weather we decided to get it out to keep bedroom cool at night. we then discovered that whilst in spare room the fan had suffered some damage to the grill, fan and centre plate.

we plugged it in and tried it only to find fan blade catching on dented guard, we remedied this only to find a crack in the blade unbalancing the fan and causing vibration and a lot of noise. time for a repair

I wasn't initially sure what glue would be best I have around the house but decided upon polystyrene contact cement, this is the type you use for modelling ie airfix kits etc, to provide some reinforcement to glue I decided to use gorilla tape.

tools I used were a small screwdriver to remove the retaining pin from fan cage, and I penknife and sandpaper to prepare and smooth fan before and after repair.

I started by giving all the edges to be glued a sand off to give the glue a rough surface to work on, I tried not to sand too much off so that there were no gaps. I was lucy that no bits had broken off the fan and the blade when pushed together stayed in place.

next I applied glue to one of the edges as per instructions on bottle, at this point the fan blade stopped staying position by itself so I used gorilla repair tape to hold it in place. I measured and cut 2x 10cm lengths and applied them to each side. I then left it overnight to allow the glue to set.

the following morning I check everything was set properly, I left the tape on to act as reinforcement and refitted the blade to the motor and ran to test it worked. with the added weight of the tape the blade was unbalanced so I measured and cut 4 more bits of tape same size as the reinforcement bits and applied these in same positions on the other 2 blade sections and retested all ok.

the tape isn't noticeable when fan in use but when turned off does reflect lights in room in the evening and more noticeable, I decided to cover the blades to sort this but I will cover this in another instructable