For a weekend project and also for science, I completely disassembled my PowerBook5,8 (the one I use as my testing setup for
Snow Leopard on PowerPC) because one of the fans had stopped working a couple of months ago and the other was making all the telltale noises of starting to become stuck.
The
science part was to try something I’ve never done: taking apart the two fans (after removing the heatsink/fan assembly).
I went onto the internets to
find discussions on servicing laptop fans, as finding replacements for these final series PowerBooks is an expensive proposition with a very long wait time and no assurances that the parted-out used fans will work for very long. Neither the cost nor the wait are in my budget.
In the end, I used a soft brush to clean out the fine dust in the fans and also in the electromagnets (accumulated after two solid years of use). Then I let the separated fans (which have ring-shaped magnets in them) soak for a couple of hours in 99 per cent isopropyl alcohol, spinning them manually inside the alcohol every few minutes to dislodge any residual dust and grime in the spindle area and also around the ring magnet area. There wasn’t a tonne, but there was enough to see junk on the bottom of the soaking container.
Unlike some of the suggestions in the threads I found on this topic, I did not add any liquid or solid lubricant. They were, from everything I can tell, never engineered for use with a lubricant. I just cleaned them thoroughly.
Following their reassembly (and seeing how both fans had gone from being hard to turn manually to spinning freely when I blew on them), I threw on some fresh thermal paste, brought it all back together, and powered it up to find both fans are working silently once more and keeping this gear running for much more Snow Leopard testing. ?
View attachment 1915301