Entry tags:
Followup on Cascading Fixer Fail
which was this post
So Saturday we went out to Lowe's and bought a new ceiling-fan-cum-overhead-light. It looked very similar to the old one -- the old one was made by Hampton Bay, the new one by Harvest Breeze, with a remarkably similar logo, so I think either the company renamed itself or one is a knockoff of the other. And Saturday evening I took down the old fixture and put up the new one. And it worked. But the fixture had room for only two chandelier-mount bulbs rather than three (I looked for that information on the outside of the box, and didn't find it), so it was even dimmer than before (the whole impetus for the project was getting more light in the bedroom). And the glass bowl on the new one is white rather than amber-y, and less attractive.
So I tried just replacing the new bowl with the old one. It fit perfectly well, but the pull-chain controlling the fan didn't work because the holes it went through weren't in quite the same position on the old and new hardware, and it was pinched somewhere. I figured that if we wanted to use the old bowl, we'd have to use the old light kit too. (The light kit, fortunately, still had enough pull-chain to work with, without any need to dive into the switch mechanism.) The light kit is screwed into the fan-motor housing with three screws, but the new light kit's base is a little smaller than the old one's, so the screws weren't long enough to reach it and hold it in place: I would need new screws, just like these but longer. The nearest hardware store was closed on Sunday, and we didn't feel like getting in the car to go to Home Depot, where there probably wouldn't be anybody to help with this sort of request anyway.
So on Monday, I called the nearby hardware store, confirmed that it was open on President's Day, walked in with one of the screws, and the proprietor spent probably fifteen minutes trying to find screws with the right diameter, thread, and length, as well as a matching nut that we could use to test candidates. After all this, I walked out with half a dozen screws (three and some spares in case some got lost), for which he didn't charge me at all (although I was also buying two cans of wood stain for a different project). It turned out that all that fiddling to find the right thread was wasted, since the part I was keeping had large holes that the screws merely went through loosely, and the part I was replacing had slightly smaller holes. But the smaller holes were close enough, and the metal thin enough, and the new screws hard enough, that I could just put them through anyway and they made their own threads. Anyway, I managed to replace the new light kit on the new ceiling fan with the old light kit, on which the old glass bowl fits and the pull-chains work. And there's room for three (3) bulbs, so we actually have slightly more light than we started with.
But![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere likes the blades on the old fan better than those on the new fan. One can't just swap them, because the screw-holes connecting the blades to the blade arms are drilled in different places. I thought of swapping blade arms too, but the screw-holes connecting them to the fan motor are drilled in different places. Fortunately, the blades are just wood-composite, and drilling new holes in them should be easy. Also fortunately, the new blade arms cover the old holes, so it won't be visible that they have an extra set of holes. But I haven't actually done any of this yet, because we switched back to the bedside-table project, about which more later.
So Saturday we went out to Lowe's and bought a new ceiling-fan-cum-overhead-light. It looked very similar to the old one -- the old one was made by Hampton Bay, the new one by Harvest Breeze, with a remarkably similar logo, so I think either the company renamed itself or one is a knockoff of the other. And Saturday evening I took down the old fixture and put up the new one. And it worked. But the fixture had room for only two chandelier-mount bulbs rather than three (I looked for that information on the outside of the box, and didn't find it), so it was even dimmer than before (the whole impetus for the project was getting more light in the bedroom). And the glass bowl on the new one is white rather than amber-y, and less attractive.
So I tried just replacing the new bowl with the old one. It fit perfectly well, but the pull-chain controlling the fan didn't work because the holes it went through weren't in quite the same position on the old and new hardware, and it was pinched somewhere. I figured that if we wanted to use the old bowl, we'd have to use the old light kit too. (The light kit, fortunately, still had enough pull-chain to work with, without any need to dive into the switch mechanism.) The light kit is screwed into the fan-motor housing with three screws, but the new light kit's base is a little smaller than the old one's, so the screws weren't long enough to reach it and hold it in place: I would need new screws, just like these but longer. The nearest hardware store was closed on Sunday, and we didn't feel like getting in the car to go to Home Depot, where there probably wouldn't be anybody to help with this sort of request anyway.
So on Monday, I called the nearby hardware store, confirmed that it was open on President's Day, walked in with one of the screws, and the proprietor spent probably fifteen minutes trying to find screws with the right diameter, thread, and length, as well as a matching nut that we could use to test candidates. After all this, I walked out with half a dozen screws (three and some spares in case some got lost), for which he didn't charge me at all (although I was also buying two cans of wood stain for a different project). It turned out that all that fiddling to find the right thread was wasted, since the part I was keeping had large holes that the screws merely went through loosely, and the part I was replacing had slightly smaller holes. But the smaller holes were close enough, and the metal thin enough, and the new screws hard enough, that I could just put them through anyway and they made their own threads. Anyway, I managed to replace the new light kit on the new ceiling fan with the old light kit, on which the old glass bowl fits and the pull-chains work. And there's room for three (3) bulbs, so we actually have slightly more light than we started with.
But
shalmestere likes the blades on the old fan better than those on the new fan. One can't just swap them, because the screw-holes connecting the blades to the blade arms are drilled in different places. I thought of swapping blade arms too, but the screw-holes connecting them to the fan motor are drilled in different places. Fortunately, the blades are just wood-composite, and drilling new holes in them should be easy. Also fortunately, the new blade arms cover the old holes, so it won't be visible that they have an extra set of holes. But I haven't actually done any of this yet, because we switched back to the bedside-table project, about which more later.