[clue-tech] Noisy computers

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 05 March 2005 11:43 am, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
> /I ha/ve an older computer (P2) that is pretty loud when it's on.  Does
> anyone know of anything I can do to make it quieter?  I guess it's the
> fan on the CPU that's making all the noise, but it's driving me crazy.

I've had a couple of fans get noisy on my,  in two cases they were CPU fans 
and in some other cases they were power supply fans,  one of which wouldn't 
rotate *at all*...

In that latter case I thought I was going to have to replace it,  but the one 
I got that was the right diameter turned out to be too thick,  and wouldn't 
fit (this was a very compact supply out of a P-B low profile machine that I 
use for test fixture stuff).

Here's the thing -- most fans use cheap sleeve bearings.  Even the ones that 
advertise ball bearings will only use them on one side,  and will use a cheap 
sleeve bearing on the other side -- that was the case with at least one of 
the CPU fans I had trouble with.

What you need to do is to peel back the paper sticker that appears on one side 
of the fan blade,  exposing the center of the shaft.  In some cases the paper 
is all the cover there is.  In other cases you'll see a barely visible 
circular line and that's a plastic plug that's sitting over the end of the 
shaft,  a sharp (x-acto or similar) knife will get those out.

Once you have access to the end of the shaft,  a drop or so of some light oil 
is all it needs to fix it.  I'm guessing "3-in-One" oil or similar,  the 
stuff I have here is labled "Sunoco Household Oil" and comes in a similar 
can,  screw-on top,  and short plastic nozzle.  Sometimes you'll see for sale 
a "needle oiler",  which will have a longish thin metal nozzle and be filled 
with some light oil,  they'll work too.

You only need a drop or so.

Once you put the oil on there,  the fan needs to sit in a position where it'll 
work its way down in there,  into the bearing.  So for example if the fan is 
normally in a vertical position,  take it off,  and leave it that way for a 
while.

It's also quite possible that this won't seem to do anything right away,  that 
it may take a while.  Don't be tempted to add more oil as a way of hurrying 
this up!

I've done a couple of CPU fans this way,  and there's also that one power 
supply I mentioned above,  where it was so stiff you could barely turn the 
blade by hand.  I had to rotate that one manually for a bit,  to get the oil 
to work its way in there.  Apparently whatever the original lubricant was in 
there had turned to bubble gum,  or similar,  and then hardened.

Anyhow,  I've done this a few times,  it's worked out quite nicely,  and I've 
never had to repeat it on any of them.  I've got stuff here that's been 
running for *years*,  pretty much 24/7,  and the uptime on the linux boxes 
here are all up in the hundreds of days (I only shut 'em down when I need to 
fiddle with the hardware).

Hope this helps...