Hood Fan Exploration

I got up early and made banana pancakes on the griddle Wed. morning. I was kind of caught up in the moment and hardly noticed that the house had pretty much filled with smoke.


We have a hood with a vent fan but the fan stopped working a few years ago. It's one of those projects that I've been meaning to get to but just never found the time until then.


This is actually a shot of it once it was back in but I forgot to get a picture of the fan assembly before it came out. It has this clever bar retainer that swings out of the way for removal - you can see it at the top of the picture holding in the fan shrouds. The assembly just plugs into an outlet that is contained within the vent shaft. Here you can see that when I replaced the assembly, I left it unplugged.

It was kind of fun breaking it down to find out if there was something obvious that I could fix to get it working again. I love the way that almost anything from the post war era or before was built with the idea that it should be repaired rather than replaced. Disassembly was pretty straight forward and kind of fun.


This is as far as I got it. I cleaned it out as well as I could and tried it again but the bushing appears to be shot. It will only run for a short while before the vibration gets so bad that it just stops. I'll try to find a local shop that services electric motors. In the meantime, the assembly is back in the vent shaft but unplugged.