Thread: Ceiling fan troubles

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I have been messing with ceiling fan motors because they are cheap and readily available, but I cant get one to spin if there is any resistance. I have heard on here that some people are use ceiling fan motors for axworthy, but I cant get it to work. Anybody wanna help me out here. whenever I put tension on it, it stops.

I got a ceiling fan to work great by attaching a pulley made from two plates directly attached to the fan. Had plenty of torque, just went way to fast.

If you Google AC motor speed controller, you'll see alot of simple schematics for building a speed controller for brush-type single phase motors, like ceiling fans. That could be a route if you're into board building. There are off the shelf controllers but they're expensive, which defeates the whole purpose of using a cheap and available motor. There are many threads in this forum on various attempts to control AC motors.

I know DD has been messing with this for awhile. Look what it did to his avatar!

I used a ceiling fan motor, with a rubber coated 2 lb lead weight attached to one arm, inside a 4 ft. tall shipping crate, then mounted it on springs and 2x4's so it would continuously wobble in random directions.
I hung another weight from the front wall to make a random knocking sound.
Stenciled "to China" and "caution: Livestock" all over it.
Put a speaker inside and a cd player outside the box (for obvious reasons)
burned a CD of the kid saying things like "Mommy, pleeeease don't ship me to China..." and "I'm soooo sorry Mom, I didn;t see that Miss Kitty was in the microwave..."

I live across the street from an elementary school, and the crosswalk is at my property line.

in the month and a half I had the "Jimmy Box" out, there were 2 car accidents - one rear-ending by a kid who said he was distracted by the wobbling box, and an old woman - whom I suspect was just an awful driver - hit my wife's visiting friend's parked car. BLAMMO'ed it too... no one was hurt, and I am contemplating NOT using it this year...