486 coolers - they are very simple, many times they start to buzzing, the normal lubrication did not help. basically no bearings, just an o-ring, at the more "complicated" version teflon rings.

what i have done? some grease on the axle, and after the final assembly, a little thin oil.

they become super smooth - one of them was extremely annoying, not anymore 😀

5cm fans from the end of the 90s. they are much better - typically one bearings, i cannot get off the bearing from the axle.
i just used a very thin oil for the bearing, i spin it with a screwdriver, then greasing of the axle.

they left the buzzing, but the noise of the airflow is very loud (this is normal).

i was surprised, how much better quality 😀 two bearings, a spring for fix the bearings position.
it was easier to lubricate the bearings, and the grease the axle.

i trained for this cooler... the ati 9800pro fan. they are dying, or died or buzzing etc. i did not know, but it is a very different one.

i get of both sticker, and no axle. i was very sad, i cannot fix it (and damaged the stickers).
i started to strain with a screwdriver around at every gaps. it worked! the basic plate works as a cap. you can put it back easily. i cannot disassemble it better, i tried first with the thinnest oil, it disappeared very fast, then a ticker one. it looked ok.

the result? my buzzing 9800pro is smooth again.

here is two gpu cooler:
tnt2 ultra reference cooler
asus v6600 gf256 cooler

the tnt2u cooler is perfect, the gf256 has some remained mechanical noise. a could not disassemble the asus gf2gts cooler - the closing ring is embedded too deeply.

I just started a similar project. Growing tired of the noise, I wanted my PC to be a little more quiet. The most of the noise (90%) came from the 50mm CPU fan and the hard drive. I already replaced the hard drive with a slightly more quiet one but dear lord, these older drives are noisy. Such a high pitched sound too. I tried Seagate, Maxtor, WD, ... all the late IDE drives (40-160GB) seem to be a lot noisier than I remember. Maybe it would be worth thinking of an SSD drive after all even if it's for Windows 98.

I like the normal noises of the retro computers 😀 this is the part of the game.

Personally I use regular motor oil or silicone grease for lubricating plain bronze bearings. Oil for smaller, grease for larger ones. A syringe is a helpful tool.

Sintered bronze (self lubricating) and closed (ZZ) ball bearings can be regenerated in hot oil. I usually heat the oil up to whatever max temp it can withstand without starting to break down (depends on the oil, but usually ~200-250 deg C when it comes to synthetic ones), put the bearings in it for an hour or so, and then let it all cool down before taking the bearings out of the oil. The idea is to make the oil less viscous to help penetration, and also make trapped air expand and escape. When it all cools down and the remaining air collapses, the resulting vacuum will suck new oil into the bearing.

I don't mind oil compatibility when it comes to this, since I got no idea what the makers lubricate fan bearings with, and it's a low load and low interface speed application anyways. The latter can be counted in centimeters per second, which is nothing in the context. You basically just want something that prevents metal to metal contact, the oil film's properties aren't all that important.

arncht wrote:

I like the normal noises of the retro computers 😀 this is the part of the game.

I remember the noise my old 486 made and I remember that it was so quiet idle that my father didn't know I hadn't turned it off. With time the drive started making this high pitched noise and the PSU fan got noisier too so for me these aren't authentic sounds but rather sounds of wear & tear. Yesterday I replaced the hard drive with a compact flash card and the sound the pc makes now sounds so much more like I remember.

a cannot agree with that... i put my seagate drive around 94 to a sponge to eliminate the annoying sound. the first 4cm fans on the 486 were quite silent, but they had a very low quality construction, they start to be noisy very fast. from the pentium age the small fans never was so silent like the nowdays fans - they had high pitch airflow noise (you can buy a new one and check around 4000-5000 rpm). most of the psu fans were uncontrolled.

they were noisy. maybe there were some branded low noise computers, but mostly the 90s hdds and fans were not silent. you can hear the mechanical (not original) sound of the fans, or the wornout bearings in the hdds. some ok, some not, it depends on the construction.

a 486 sounded very similar: https://photos.app.goo.gl/HpnECun7zaivFk9m7

or 😀 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWffiUARkbQ

arncht wrote:

a cannot agree with that... i put my seagate drive around 94 to a sponge to eliminate the annoying sound. the first 4cm fans on the 486 were quite silent, but they had a very low quality construction, they start to be noisy very fast. from the pentium age the small fans never was so silent like the nowdays fans - they had high pitch airflow noise (you can buy a new one and check around 4000-5000 rpm). most of the psu fans were uncontrolled.

they were noisy. maybe there were some branded low noise computers, but mostly the 90s hdds and fans were not silent. you can hear the mechanical (not original) sound of the fans, or the wornout bearings in the hdds. some ok, some not, it depends on the construction.

a 486 sounded very similar: https://photos.app.goo.gl/HpnECun7zaivFk9m7

Well you may not agree but it was true :p No way I could hide the sound my PC currently makes. Don't forget: most of these old 486 had NO fans except in the PSU. My 486SX didn't even have a heat sink. The fan in the PSU is actually not bad now that I cleaned it - the hard drive is the biggest noise maker. The old rattling when reading sounds right but the high pitched sound definitely didn't exist back when I used it in 1994-1995. All my older hard drives are very noisy and a lot noisier than I recall. Heck, I still have sound files I recorded back in 1995 with a cheap Creative microphone which was placed right on top of the PC and you couldn't hear the PC at ALL.

dx2-66 was with heatsink with/without fan. over that the fan was the typical scenario. i am talking about a typical 486 (not yours) - i built many computers in the past.
eg the fujitsu hdds were quite silent, but the seagates had noisy seek, typical rotation sound before 95. you can hear clearly, when it spins up.

same:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDQ9jr0f6JA

arncht wrote:

dx2-66 was with heatsink and/or fan. over that the fan was the typical scenario. i am talking about a typical 486 (not yours) - […]
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dx2-66 was with heatsink and/or fan. over that the fan was the typical scenario. i am talking about a typical 486 (not yours) - i built many computers in the past.
eg the fujitsu hdds were quite silence, but the seagates had noisy head, typical rotation sound before 95. you can hear clearly, when it spin up.

same:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDQ9jr0f6JA

Most DX2's I've seen were just a heatsink - the Overdrive one had a built-in heatsink as well and all Pentiums I's I worked on up till my pentium P233 MMX is just a heatsink as well. I think some non-Intel CPUs required a fan though and I believe the DX4 100 came with a fan by default but I've also worked on quite a few old PCs and until 1997-1998 I barely saw CPU fans - nor GPU fans in fact. The main noise always came from the PSU and when the hard drive was reading. The hard drive was DEFINITELY the quieter of the two though when idle and now most of my old hard drives I try are a lot louder. The exception is my 386's Seagate hard drive which is as quiet as I remember but it's only 85MB so quite useless for most of my builds - 15MB free space after DOS and Windows doesn't leave a lot.

Also what you posted is nowhere near as loud as the drives I have problems with - it's a low level whine with the drive's main noises being heard when reading. What I'm talking about is a loud high pitched sound CONSTANTLY. I've found quite a few topics about this issue and it seems pretty normal for these old drives to make that much noise over time. The ticking when reading doesn't bother me at all - that's part of the nostalgia - but a high continuous whine gets very annoying.

* the non-branded pentiums were mostly with fans
* many hdds had spinning noise, when it was new
* i know what happen with the bearings, not every old hdds affected

Hello, i would like too to restore some fans which are noisy from some old hardware. How can i pull off the fan from the motor without breaking anything ?