I hear you about the smell. Can't give you any tips on disassembly. As to the smell, I'd find a friend who is mechanically minded. Have her (him) clean out the fan bearings with aerosol brake or carburetor cleaner. Relube with two cycle gas mixing oil. That's a good grade of ND30 or nearly that viscosity, and fairly pure oil. Run the fan outdoors for an hour or so, to clear out the vapors that remain.

Good luck, that sounds like no fun at all. I hope that helps.
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Christopher A. Young
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Over the years, the fans I buy are getting worse and worse smelling. Some will smell like machine oil, others will smell heavily like plastic, and some will smell like diesel (of course it's not diesel, but that's the closest thing I can compare it to). These smells do not fade with the months or years. I'm quite sensitive to these fumes, and end up coughing like crazy for hours after. The phenomena of increasingly smelly products seems to be well known, judging from what I've found on the web. It doesn't matter how high end you try to buy, the smell doesn't seem to be correlated. Even mostly metal fans are afflicted with this problem.

The fan that I found to be the least obnoxious in the past was Sunbeam SSF1600RC oscillating stand fan: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001R1XJ9A
http://www.amazon.com/Sunbeam-SSF160.../dp/B001R1XJ9A

However, the more recent ones I've bought exude the oil/plastic smell, especially when the ambient temperature is hot and/or it has been running for an hour or so. No worse than other fans. But it gets me worried. Either join the ranks of large quantity electricity users and get A/C (and banish fresh air from my apartment forever), swelter in unimaginable heat, or breath the fumes and eventually die. As I do not know what is causing the smell, I am not sure whether I can do anything about it. If it is hot plastic, likely not. If it's bad oil, maybe I can oil the motor and hope that the good quality oil I use will displace the bad original oil. I know, it's more likely they will mix and stay there forever, but I'm really out of options.

I haven't given it a look-see and try. I've been trying to find instructions, pictures, or videos on the web showing how to get at the inside. Would anyone know of such material? I have no fear that I will void the warranty (which I certainly will) -- when you can't breathe, a warranty becomes unimportant. As far as maiming myself in the process, there is nothing in the instruction booklet warning about dangers of self servicing (most other products these days say that there are no consumer-servicable parts, but this one doesn't say that).

Apart from how to take it apart, can any respiratorily challenged person recommend a fan that does *not* have such a smell? It seems impossible to find these days as they all come from the same place.