Golden 12” Industrial Ventilating Fan

You know those Chinese-Asian extra strong industrial exhaust fans that have the 4 backwards ‘D’ blades & cast metal cone shaped hub? I’ve had that fan in my wishlist since I was a small boy. I love the muscular looks from the 8 sided frame, wide beefy blades, and the big fat motors that drive them. Well, I’d never been able to afford one of those fans because of their hefty pricetags, even when used. But earlier this year I found the fan I’d been looking for all this time, only the thing is, it was in pretty bad shape. For one the iconic bladeset that originally came with it is gone, and later I found out the seller’s attempt to replace the original bearings which he said wrecked the original blades that were stuck in place made the shaft bend between the rear bearing & rotor. As a result of him swapping the original heavy duty fan blades to a flimsy aluminium fan blade he dropped his asking price, and I got this thing for really really cheap.

Golden isn’t a brand that I’m familiar with. So because of that, and because this is my first heavy duty exhaust fan, I immediately tore it apart to learn its guts. As it turns out, this fan is probably one of the crappiest extra strong exhaust fans available. The shaft on this thing isn’t properly hardened, so a hard tap from a hammer will bend it no problem. The rotor is warped in a really weird way from the factory, and the motor insulation are loose in some spots. But because I got this thing for cheap, I can’t really complain.

Conveniently, I made a low noise//high presssure fan blade just days before I unexpectedly purchased this fan as an experiment. So after I managed to remove the bodge job crappy fan blade the seller put on this fan just so he could sell it, I installed my experimental fan blade, and it worked brilliantly. Sure there is a big gap between the fan blade & shroud which annoys me & probably you too and it doesn’t look that good from the intake side, but for what I have planned for this fan, it’s good enough. Plus I now have a high preassure exhaust fan which makes me happy, so that’s a plus.

And because this fan already has new holes drilled into the body by the previous owner & its blade is no longer original, I decided that this fan won’t spend its life on a display shelf & that I’m free to use this fan for any experiments. One change I’ve made that you might have noticed is the pullchain switch. Although this fan has deeply pitched fan blades & the number of blades don’t match the number of motor brackets, I still think its full speed is waaay too loud. Originally I wanted to just choke power coming to the motor with a capacitor & leave it as it is, but then I thought what if I need this fan to run on its full capacity. So I thought I’d install a ceiling fan pullchain switch on the motor, wire position 1 to run on full speed, leave position 2 empty, and wire the 3rd position with a capacitor in series. But then an idea popped in my head, why don’t I use the leftover switch position to make the fan run on intake, I might need it right? So after some thinking, I wired the switch as such so that the first pull gives you full speed on exhaust, 2nd pull gives you low speed exhaust, and 3rd pull gives you full speed intake. On low exhaust this fan moves about the same amount of air as my New Star 12” exhaust fan (    • New Star 12" Industrial Exhaust Fan   ), but makes waaaaaaaay less noise.

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