The fan of my R40 (2681-BAG) has difficulties starting while booting and
makes some sizzling noise which ends when I'm tapping the housing in the
fan's area. I figured it could only be the bearing of the fan.

In HMM I found FRU P/N 46P3099: it consists of the fan and the whole heat
piping thing. Is there any cost-saving way to exchange the fan only? The
whole assembly would cost me ~50 EUR.

TIA - Jan

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:04:28 +0100 Jan C. Schmitz wrote:

> The fan of my R40 (2681-BAG) has difficulties starting while booting and
> makes some sizzling noise which ends when I'm tapping the housing in the
> fan's area. I figured it could only be the bearing of the fan.
> 
> In HMM I found FRU P/N 46P3099: it consists of the fan and the whole heat
> piping thing.

> Is there any cost-saving way to exchange the fan only? The
> whole assembly would cost me ~50 EUR.
> 
No, unfortunately.  It's an assembly, riveted together.  Disassembly would 
probably destroy it.  I see you're in Germany, is there a German equivalent to 
eBay?
-- 
Ernie B.

Communication:  The art of moving an idea from one mind to another, hopefully 
without distortion.

Am Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:37:11 GMT schrieb Ernie B.:

>> In HMM I found FRU P/N 46P3099: it consists of the fan and the whole heat
>> piping thing.
> 
>> Is there any cost-saving way to exchange the fan only? The
>> whole assembly would cost me ~50 EUR.
>> 
> No, unfortunately.  It's an assembly, riveted together.  Disassembly would 
> probably destroy it.  I see you're in Germany, is there a German equivalent to 
> eBay?

On eBay.de you can find used assemblies (and I wouldn't want to rely on
that) and a seller from the USA. The shipping costs (tax?) exceed the
original IBM spare part's price of 50 EUR (incl. shipping).

Thanks, Ernie!

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:07:08 +0100, Jan C. Schmitz wrote:

> Am Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:37:11 GMT schrieb Ernie B.:
> 
>>> In HMM I found FRU P/N 46P3099: it consists of the fan and the whole
>>> heat piping thing.
>> 
>>> Is there any cost-saving way to exchange the fan only? The whole
>>> assembly would cost me ~50 EUR.
>>> 
>> No, unfortunately.  It's an assembly, riveted together.  Disassembly
>> would probably destroy it.  I see you're in Germany, is there a German
>> equivalent to eBay?
> 
> On eBay.de you can find used assemblies (and I wouldn't want to rely on
> that) and a seller from the USA. The shipping costs (tax?) exceed the
> original IBM spare part's price of 50 EUR (incl. shipping).
> 
> Thanks, Ernie!

Probably the weakest point in the 4x and 6x thinkpad series are the damn 
heatsync/fan assemblies.  That and the whole cooling system.  

- The T43 has no heat dissipation whatsoever on the southbridge, Lenovo 
puts like 15 temperature sensors in the laptop and one is located right 
on it.  This means the fan never stops and runs full bore because one 
sensor is over the threshold.  Could have been fixed by a couple inch 
extension of copper.

- The T60 (at least the ones using the junk ATi graphics chipsets), have 
a massive heatsync assembly, but on the GPU there is too much space 
between the copper and the GPU.  So what do they do?  Rather then 
engineer a better heatsync that actually fits, they put spacers in 
between that cut heat dissipation and the GPU always remains a good 20C 
higher then the CPU, even after applying Artic Silver... don't even think 
about removing the spacers...

- Both of the above models suffer from higher then necessary GPU/CPU 
temps because heatpipes are either shared or too close.

These observations were made on ATi graphics chipset models, I really 
hope the same problems don't exist on the Intel and Nvidia models.  Well 
even the older ATi chipset on the T42 wasn't bad.. the fan stays off.  
The old Savage's on the T2x series kept real cool.

Sorry to rant a bit, I really like thinkpads, but this has been a really 
big annoyance, I don't recommend the T43 for anyone, there wasn't much 
engineering done on it.  The T42 had it right, but speeding up the FSB 
without additional cooling is stupid.

er, yeah

Joe

So I had the same problem. I thought my fan was toast on my R40. My
computer would frequently overheat and shut itself off, then refuse to
start up because of a "fan error".

I ended up disassembling the laptop using the following 'this guide'
(http://tinyurl.com/yd3axat). Under the section "Removing and Replacing
a FRU" I found number 1120 for the fan assembly.

Once the assembly was out of the case, I noticed that indeed the fan
casing was riveted together. However I took a small eyeglasses
screwdriver and pried the riveted bottom of off the assembly so I could
get at the fan. The fan blades actually came right out when I gave them
a slight tug. Attached to the fan blades is the shaft that actually
rotates the blades around. I sprayed a -very small- amount of WD-40 in
the hole where the shaft came out of, while trying very hard to avoid
the electronics (I had a cloth around the outside of it to catch extra
spray). Then I put it back together and it spun easily when I hit it
with my fingers. I also let it dry overnight, I wasn't going to
originally but in hindsight it was probably a good idea.

I put the fan back in, then decided to duct tape the riveted part I had
popped off earlier back on to the assembly. I'm not even sure you need
to do this, but I figured it couldn't hurt. After taping the bottom on,
I checked to see if the fan could still spin. It could.

Now I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but on my heatsink there
was a weird looking pad along with some odd plastic stuff. I decided to
remove the plastic and the pad, then clean up the surface a bit. Went to
Radio Slack, bought some Arctic Silver 5 and thinly spread a layer on my
heatsink. After that I put everything back together and everything's
working well!

Somewhere on teh intarwebs mpetro24 wrote:
> So I had the same problem. I thought my fan was toast on my R40. My
> computer would frequently overheat and shut itself off, then refuse to
> start up because of a "fan error".
>
> I ended up disassembling the laptop using the following 'this guide'
> (http://tinyurl.com/yd3axat). Under the section "Removing and
> Replacing a FRU" I found number 1120 for the fan assembly.
>
> Once the assembly was out of the case, I noticed that indeed the fan
> casing was riveted together. However I took a small eyeglasses
> screwdriver and pried the riveted bottom of off the assembly so I
> could get at the fan. The fan blades actually came right out when I
> gave them a slight tug. Attached to the fan blades is the shaft that
> actually rotates the blades around. I sprayed a -very small- amount
> of WD-40 in the hole where the shaft came out of, while trying very
> hard to avoid the electronics (I had a cloth around the outside of it
> to catch extra spray). Then I put it back together and it spun easily
> when I hit it with my fingers. I also let it dry overnight, I wasn't
> going to originally but in hindsight it was probably a good idea.
>
> I put the fan back in, then decided to duct tape the riveted part I
> had popped off earlier back on to the assembly. I'm not even sure you
> need to do this, but I figured it couldn't hurt. After taping the
> bottom on, I checked to see if the fan could still spin. It could.
>
> Now I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but on my heatsink there
> was a weird looking pad along with some odd plastic stuff. I decided
> to remove the plastic and the pad, then clean up the surface a bit.
> Went to Radio Slack, bought some Arctic Silver 5 and thinly spread a
> layer on my heatsink. After that I put everything back together and
> everything's working well!

Well done. It's a good feeling to fix your own machine huh?

If I may I have a couple comments?

Firstly WD-40 is great for penetrating and freeing up siezed components and 
as a temporary lube but it dries up pretty quickly, especially where there's 
heat. If I were you I'd pull that R40 apart again (it's not that hard with 
the service manual) and put either a small quantity of light grease or a 
droplet (I use a toothpick to accurately drop a small amount) of new engine 
oil into the bearing/hole.

It's my opinion that, if you don't do this then you're going to have 
problems again fairly soon as the WD-40 is likely mostly gone by now and 
it'll be running dry and wearing the bearing surfaces.

Duct tape? Mate, let me tell you about the geek version of duct tape. It's 
called hot (melt) glue and is amazingly useful for anyone tinkering about 
with hardware. I didn't know I needed it until a friend who's also into 
hardware / electronics gave me the heads up. Now I'd be completely lost 
without it! Wonderful stuff.

The ThinkPad R40 was a bit of a transitionary machine. It was designed with 
the power-hungry Pentium 4 mobile in mind but, as Intel released the far 
superior Pentium M (Banias) pretty much straight after after the R40 was 
released IBM fitted the later (and bulk of) R40s with a new motherboard 
designed to make use of the new CPU rather than design a whole new machine 
around it so soon after the R40 release.

I'm guessing that your R40 has a Pentium M (or Celeron M) CPU rather than 
the Pentium 4 M that the earlier ones had? I say this because both of my 
R40s are Pentium M (one used to be Celeron M), both have an ATI GPU and both 
had the strange plastic / foil 'thingy' between the CPU die and the 
heatsink. I assume (with absolutely no evidence) that it was likely a 
modification for the non Pentium 4 machines (which ran *much* hotter) so 
that the CPU / heatsink interface wasn't too efficient and the fan would 
still cut in from time to time.

With the heatpipes and fins being in the corner, on two sides of the machine 
and a fan intake in the same area but underneath, a non-stressed Pentium M 
wouldn't require the fan very much at all. Convection pulls heat through the 
intake and out over the fins. That's not good for things like the ATI GPU 
(if fitted), Northbridge, RAM chips and HDD all of which require at least 
some airflow through the whole case. Thus a case designed with a CPU Thermal 
Design Power (TDP) of ~35W in mind was used for a family of CPUs with a TDP 
of ~24W. It doesn't sound like much but actually it makes a big difference 
to how the case is / should be designed.

If your machine is like mine, Pentium or Celeron (not 4) M (Banais with 1MB 
L2 cache) and you've removed the 'thermal interferance' from in between the 
CPU and heatsink (and replaced it with AS5 as I did) then I suggest that you 
tape over the fan inlet directly beneath the fan. (I have on both of my 
machines a long time ago and I can assure you they're both running perfectly 
fine thermally.) This means that, whenever the fan *does* kick in it pulls 
air through the other slots in the case bottom, ensuring that you don't get 
isolated hot-spots in the case. (In the Pentium 4 equiped R40s the fan ran 
so often that air was pulled from all through the case anyway, hence the 
attempt to interfere with good heat conduction between CPU and 'sink in the 
later models, to make sure that the fan ran more than it otherwise would 
have.)

Of course, if your R40 has a Pentium 4 CPU fitted then ignore the above. <g>
-- 
Cheers,
Shaun.

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's 
warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchet, 'Jingo'. 

Somewhere on teh intarwebs ~misfit~ wrote:
> Somewhere on teh intarwebs mpetro24 wrote:
>> So I had the same problem. I thought my fan was toast on my R40. My
>> computer would frequently overheat and shut itself off, then refuse
>> to start up because of a "fan error".
>>
>> I ended up disassembling the laptop using the following 'this guide'
>> (http://tinyurl.com/yd3axat). Under the section "Removing and
>> Replacing a FRU" I found number 1120 for the fan assembly.
>>
>> Once the assembly was out of the case, I noticed that indeed the fan
>> casing was riveted together. However I took a small eyeglasses
>> screwdriver and pried the riveted bottom of off the assembly so I
>> could get at the fan. The fan blades actually came right out when I
>> gave them a slight tug. Attached to the fan blades is the shaft that
>> actually rotates the blades around. I sprayed a -very small- amount
>> of WD-40 in the hole where the shaft came out of, while trying very
>> hard to avoid the electronics (I had a cloth around the outside of it
>> to catch extra spray). Then I put it back together and it spun easily
>> when I hit it with my fingers. I also let it dry overnight, I wasn't
>> going to originally but in hindsight it was probably a good idea.
>>
>> I put the fan back in, then decided to duct tape the riveted part I
>> had popped off earlier back on to the assembly. I'm not even sure you
>> need to do this, but I figured it couldn't hurt. After taping the
>> bottom on, I checked to see if the fan could still spin. It could.
>>
>> Now I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but on my heatsink
>> there was a weird looking pad along with some odd plastic stuff. I
>> decided to remove the plastic and the pad, then clean up the surface
>> a bit. Went to Radio Slack, bought some Arctic Silver 5 and thinly
>> spread a layer on my heatsink. After that I put everything back
>> together and everything's working well!
>
> Well done. It's a good feeling to fix your own machine huh?
>
> If I may I have a couple comments?
>
> Firstly WD-40 is great for penetrating and freeing up siezed
> components and as a temporary lube but it dries up pretty quickly,
> especially where there's heat. If I were you I'd pull that R40 apart
> again (it's not that hard with the service manual) and put either a
> small quantity of light grease or a droplet (I use a toothpick to
> accurately drop a small amount) of new engine oil into the
> bearing/hole.
> It's my opinion that, if you don't do this then you're going to have
> problems again fairly soon as the WD-40 is likely mostly gone by now
> and it'll be running dry and wearing the bearing surfaces.
>
> Duct tape? Mate, let me tell you about the geek version of duct tape.
> It's called hot (melt) glue and is amazingly useful for anyone
> tinkering about with hardware. I didn't know I needed it until a
> friend who's also into hardware / electronics gave me the heads up.
> Now I'd be completely lost without it! Wonderful stuff.
>
> The ThinkPad R40 was a bit of a transitionary machine. It was
> designed with the power-hungry Pentium 4 mobile in mind but, as Intel
> released the far superior Pentium M (Banias) pretty much straight
> after after the R40 was released IBM fitted the later (and bulk of)
> R40s with a new motherboard designed to make use of the new CPU
> rather than design a whole new machine around it so soon after the
> R40 release.
> I'm guessing that your R40 has a Pentium M (or Celeron M) CPU rather
> than the Pentium 4 M that the earlier ones had? I say this because
> both of my R40s are Pentium M (one used to be Celeron M), both have
> an ATI GPU and both had the strange plastic / foil 'thingy' between
> the CPU die and the heatsink. I assume (with absolutely no evidence)
> that it was likely a modification for the non Pentium 4 machines
> (which ran *much* hotter) so that the CPU / heatsink interface wasn't
> too efficient and the fan would still cut in from time to time.
>
> With the heatpipes and fins being in the corner, on two sides of the
> machine and a fan intake in the same area but underneath, a
> non-stressed Pentium M wouldn't require the fan very much at all.
> Convection pulls heat through the intake and out over the fins.
> That's not good for things like the ATI GPU (if fitted), Northbridge,
> RAM chips and HDD all of which require at least some airflow through
> the whole case. Thus a case designed with a CPU Thermal Design Power
> (TDP) of ~35W

My bad. The Pentium 4 M range of CPUs that were available in the R40 chassis 
had TDPs ranging from 40W to 46.6W

> in mind was used for a family of CPUs with a TDP of
> ~24W. It doesn't sound like much but actually it makes a big
> difference to how the case is / should be designed.

As per my correction above the difference is a lot more. The Banais range of 
CPUs were 'more powerful' CPUs and used around half of the power, producing 
around half of the heat.

> If your machine is like mine, Pentium or Celeron (not 4) M (Banais
> with 1MB L2 cache) and you've removed the 'thermal interferance' from
> in between the CPU and heatsink (and replaced it with AS5 as I did)
> then I suggest that you tape over the fan inlet directly beneath the
> fan. (I have on both of my machines a long time ago and I can assure
> you they're both running perfectly fine thermally.) This means that,
> whenever the fan *does* kick in it pulls air through the other slots
> in the case bottom, ensuring that you don't get isolated hot-spots in
> the case. (In the Pentium 4 equiped R40s the fan ran so often that
> air was pulled from all through the case anyway, hence the attempt to
> interfere with good heat conduction between CPU and 'sink in the
> later models, to make sure that the fan ran more than it otherwise
> would have.)
> Of course, if your R40 has a Pentium 4 CPU fitted then ignore the
> above. <g>
-- 
Shaun.

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's 
warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchet, 'Jingo'.