Hi!

I salvaged two out of a building teardown. Both were dead for the
same reason. The crimped-shut Emerson Electric fan motors
had ground to a halt on dry bearings.

I find these exceedingly "entertaining". I've fished out numerous old
box fans from the trash over the years, and the thing that gets me
about all of them is how nobody *ever* followed the instructions to
oil them every _six months_. Only forty plus years later did the
motors finally lock up, and even that was only on a few of them. Even
when they're locked up, a little oil can save them and the bearings
are usually still quite usable.

By comparison to today's products, I'm sure that those old motors were
expensive to make. I feel it's fair to say that with the improved
technology we have today, making a "permanently lubricated" motor that
would run at least that long should be easily doable at a relatively
low cost. And yet even the good ones just don't last that long. Maybe
I'm overlooking something here--that this would be possible at low
cost but not "the lowest cost" (which may be all that matters).

Then the coils iced solid, and the Klixon overload on
the compressor soon toasted.

Good thing it did. I picked up a JC Penney's brand dehunidifier that
had a Fasco motor which was solidly locked up. I had to replace that
motor because nothing short of a bomb or violence would have opened it
up. I tried sneaking oil into it only to find that I couldn't get
enough oil in there to make a difference.

The original fan motor died with the compressor running, nobody
noticed for a few days and I guess it was just too much for the
compressor motor to handle. A few months after I fixed it, the
compressor simply died and would not start. All it would do was hum
and pop a breaker. I put the new fan motor aside for future use in the
Coldspot (it is exactly the same RPM and rotation direction) and saved
many of the electrical pieces (humidstat, pilot light, cord set) along
with some of the sheet metal.

William