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Apr 26th, 2026 | | AD Chevy Trucks  Over 6,000 pictures Brad Allen has an awesome collection of Chevrolet factory pictures that he has set up from film strips. Check them out!
Lots of work on Brad's part ... pure enjoyment (and references) for you!
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For helping keep this great
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on the Internet for over 30 years! and not clogged down
with Ads!  Again, thanks!
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#34904 07/07/2003 7:46 AM | Joined: Jun 2001 Posts: 34 Member | | Member Joined: Jun 2001 Posts: 34 | I was installing an electric cooling fan and removing the original belt driven fan from my 261 and discovered an interesting thing. The old fan had two badly cracked blades at the rivets. A very dangerous thing, I think! I could flex the broken blades by hand easily.
After I got the new fan on I went for a test drive and found that what I thought was a driveline or motor mount vibration that needed fixing was GONE! I now remember that there was a posting about fan vibration but I foolishly didn't make the connection to my vibration.
CHECK THOSE OLD FANS FOR CRACKS! A broken blade at 2000rpm would ruin your day. | | |
#34905 07/07/2003 2:23 PM | Joined: Nov 2000 Posts: 427 'Bolter | | 'Bolter Joined: Nov 2000 Posts: 427 | My '61 Chevy lost a fan blade while I was humming along and I thought I had busted a flywheel or worse. I quickly stopped and after going over everything, couldn't find the source of the problem and restarted the engine and the wobble was severe. I went back under the hood (on the side of the road) and discovered a fanblade embedded in the inner fender just behind the battery. Thrown in like an Ed Ames tomahawk toss...whomp! It was 2/3rds of the way through the inner fender and looked just like an axe into a tree. Wowzers.
I worked, pried, and metal fatigued and finally broke off the opposite blade to get it balanced again and drove another 800 miles home before hitting the boneyard for a new fan blade. That was 32 years ago. My how time flies...and so do fanblades. Better into the inner fender than through the hood.
I never moved the fanblade and it was still there when I sold the car a year or so later.
Yes they can and do let go. The scary part for me was thinking about all the times I had hung over the radiator working on stuff and revving the throttle.
A mechanic friend saw me doing that one day (before the fanblade broke) and explained to NEVER stand in front of a car while working on a running motor. He showed me some ugly scars on his legs where he was mashed into the back wall of the garage by a car he was working on when it slipped into gear and then used his legs as a cushion to soften the impact into the back wall of the garage. In his case it was a stack of tools, parts, steel, and other odds and ends the tend accumulate around the garage walls. They were all embedded into the back of his (also broken) legs. | | |
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