Need some help with a heatsink maglev fan. It’s my thriftiness that makes it necessary to burden you poor people with my problems. But a Dell I’m working on has a Sunon Maglev fan in it.
Contrary to the name it’s only partially “guided” buy magnetic forces. There ar-e bearings in these fans -extremely low maintenance bearings, but that seems to be the problem. The maglev fan is making a grindy noise every now and again. When it gets going like that it stays for a while. One person recommended actually washing the whole thing with pretty hot water and dish soap and then rinsing with distilled water and adding a tiny amount of sewing machine oil. My concern is the bearings in this fan were never designed for any kind of oil -especially a more natural and less synthetic oil… but what about teflon? or graphite?
Also if you examine the diagram here from Sunon (the manufacturer whom I’ve already contacted) (they weren’t too forth-coming) you can see that this fan has a metal “maglev plate” under the fan, however mine only has PCB there. Nothing has ever fallen off of this fan it came this way and didn’t always make noises.
I’m partially attached to this particular fan because it has more coils on the stator than the others I’ve seen for this heatsink.
I ca-n buy another, but I’d like to see what kind of recommendations I can get for a good lubricant before I do this. I don’t have much to lose by trying to ease it’s grinding as it still seems to do it’s job ok.