Nice to see the Casablanca listed - I had a beautiful one - spent the big
bucks for it and it worked flawlessly for 17 years and sold (sob) with the
house. It was a large stack metal ring set - and had three speeds that were
provided by the use of high tech - oh - capacitors - that changed the impedance
and allowed more or less current to flow - and current drives the motors via
magnetic field strength.

Martin [ holder of a nice 4 pole DC motor used for very high torque. ]

Larry Jaques wrote:
On Sun, 13 Dec 2009 06:30:51 +0000 (UTC), the infamous David Lesher
scrawled the following:

Mark Rand writes:


Actually, it's quite simple to design a shaded pole motor with two shading
windings that can be switched for direction change. Just never seen it
commercially.
Never taken apart a ceiling fan but have to wonder what kind of
motors luck within same...

They're _electric_ David. I beleive they're called drafty pole motors
with windy windings. Just thought you'd like to know.

P.S: Translation for the Canuckistanis and Poms: "draughty"

P.P.S: For those of you who still want to know more about the actual
motors, Wikipedia has a good article discussing them briefly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceiling_fan