OK, the jackasses gentle souls that owned my house before me can't install a ceiling fan properly so now I have a broken ceiling fan on my hands. (The lower part--which is supposed to stay still--started spinning around, thus winding up all the wiring in the canopy and shorting out the motor before I could switch it off.) The motor case seems to be impenetrable, and a good chunk of the shorted wires are trapped inside. I tried to unravel them and feed heat-shrink insulation down each wire in the hopes of salvaging the motor but to no avail. No luck on finding a replacement motor either, and I suspect it would be more expensive than a new fan.
Since there are about a billion nifty parts in a modern ceiling fan (seriously, could they make a simple device any more complicated if they tried?) it seems like a ridiculous waste to just dispose of this thing. I can save screws, bits of wire, electrical connectors, etc. as spare parts, but beyond that, what else can I do? Maybe an artist can use the parts for something?
