Assembling The Motor of a Ceiling Fan

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Drew Finn and I am here for expertvillage.com. I am a professional home inspector and I am going to show you how to install a ceiling fan today. Now we are going to do a pre-assembly; the motor base, the canopy and the extension rod and in this installation, the extension rod is the longer one. First thing we need to do is pull the safety pin out. Just use a pair of pliers or your strippers to take the pin out. This will go in the canopy and this is going to be hanging down holding the motor and what we need to do is feed the wires through here. Now when we get it in here we've got a couple of screws to take out. If you are doing a flush mount, you would be using these screws. You can use either a Phillips screw driver or a regular flat screw driver. Now I would advise using a flat screw driver. You can get a lot more torque out of it and these happen to be painted so it would be very good to use the flat one; same for the other screw. Now we've got that apart, we can take the rubber band off here, stretch the wires out. We are going to have to feed them through this shaft. What I like to do is temporarily twist all three together and it would be a little easier feeding them through; they'll all go on the same side of those obstructions that we have here. I want to fish them through on this side; there's a little more room. Over here, we have the ground wire and I want them through on the other side so that there is a little bit more room. Now we've got all the wires through here. We just have to feed them through. Just twist them up again; I may straighten them out. One thing you want to make sure is you don't plug in the wires real quick because it could strip the wire if it hits a sharp edge. So you gently pull them through. You notice with my hand I am feeding them in here rather than just pulling them like this. To pull them like that they could hit the corner and do damage to the wire. So you want to straighten it with your hand, kinda awkward and pull it right through. Then we have it going right in, slide it in and across here is where we put the safety pin in. You've got to line up the holes and then very carefully put it in. You've got to play with the wires. You've got to make sure we don't pinch the wires as we are getting the pin through; just sort of wiggle that. We got the pin completely through and we just snap on the safety pin into here and we are all set to go. Now if we don't snap that in real well or forget to put the pin in, the whole fan assembly could fall from the ceiling. Now we've completed one of the pre-installations. This is how it is going to hang from the ceiling. We've got pin in there, it's good and secure, we've got the wires that we fed through very carefully so we are good to go to our next step. "