My new shop ceiling fan. Doing what a fan is supposed to do. Fanning.
Just Another Story About Making Working Things Out of Junk
One of my favorite things is making a thing to meet a need out of stuff I already have. The fact that I do this time and time again feeds my reluctance to throw stuff away, and that is why I have stuff with which to make things when needs arise. It is a delightful self-perpetuating cycle.
I had this niggling awareness in the back of my mind that I had an old ceiling fan in a box in my new shop. And I needed to put up a ceiling fan in my new shop. The problem was, this fan was designed to mount directly to a flat ceiling, and my shop doesn't have one. Mounting that fan on this ceiling would require some field engineering.
Today I got a round Tuit and this is what I did. Not one single dime was spent. Everything used was on hand.
Disclaimers: This is not a "wow" project. This is an example of the boringly practical application of engineering brain cells to solve a problem. Yes, the fan is small for the space. Yes, the wirenuts are exposed. Yes, over time (30 or 40 years maybe) the miniscule amount of torque the fan puts on the hardware could loosen something. These are all acceptable design limitations, and were considered by me, the designer, owner and installer, to be negligible.
Getting Started
I need a non-destructive way to mount to the steel structure of my brand new Carolina Carports metal building. There are some cross-braces screwed to the rafter segments that provides about four feet of level mounting potential. The fan needs to be suspended from a point about twelve feet above the floor.
Unistrut will be used. I have some small pieces on hand, so one of those will be bolted to the underside of that cross-brace up there at the peak of the roof. The fan itself needs to be around eight feet from the floor. Now I just need to transition to some form of hanger.
There will be some torque and also some swinging is possible, so the coupling between the unistrut and the hanger needs to be flexible. On one of my benches, in a dump of parts removed from The Bug when it was still just "the trailer" I find several 1/4-20 eyebolts. Perfect! I open one eye a little and pass the other through it. Then I close the first one and now I have a flexible 1/4-20 attachment device.
Now I need something to attach the bolt to. Something needs to leave the bolt and fall down about three and a half feet to meet the motor of the fan. Commercial offerings are all made of steel pipe. I don't have any steel pipe long enough for this (with the exception of some EMT, but I don't want to use it for this).
Half-inch PVC pipe will do the trick. In my bucket of PVC parts I find two end caps. I drill a 9/32" hole at the apex of the arc of the cap. The 1/4-20 bolt gets bolted here. Washers, nuts and appropriate torque and we're done.
The bottom cap gets a standard straight 2-1/4" bolt through its hole. That drops down through a nut, two fender washers and terminates at a 1/4-20 strut nut. This assembly will sandwich the curled ears of the unistrut and form a very strong, secure union right above the motor.
The motor originally came with a six-inch long bracket attached to its stator shaft by means of a 13/16" nut. One two-inch piece of unistrut provides a nice slot for that shaft. The addition of a half-inch washer to the original nut and lock washer, and the stator shaft is permanently affixed to the unistrut. The aforementioned 1/4-20 strut nut assemblage joins this group, and we now have full suspension from building structure to fan motor. Using all reclaimed parts from my junk bin. I love this job!
I have a length of abandoned orange extension cord that is now put to service to get power to the fan. Zip ties keep things tidy. The fan is plugged into one of the high outlets I installed for the lighting circuit in the new shop. Boom. Done.
There Be Pics Here!
This fan is only a forty-two incher, but I can really tell a difference when it is on in the shop. The air is circulating rather than just being stagnant. Hot humid stagnant air is really uncomfortable. If I can at least get it to move my attitude improves significantly.
So now at last this is done. Check it off the Million Thing List at last.
And oh yeah, it is a thing that works.
I recently did a four-day trip to South Georgia and back. Spent three nights in The Bug. It was wonderful.
The Bug has two new forward solar panels, and now it has deflector shields to protect them from flying debris.
We traveled to Mississippi and did an overnighter at a KOA campground 150 miles away. It was a good test of The Bug's systems.
Three good things: red, blue and yellow.
Choice and Peers: Two concepts important to this post.