Early 1980's SMC Laguna 132 cm

[Jean Lemieux]

I finally found an all polished brass early 1980's SMC Laguna. I had been looking for one for a while. They are pretty rare in this finish. The plating of the finish contains 24k gold. I found this one exactly a year ago in October 2020. It was very dusty and tarnished when I acquired it. I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that finish contains gold but when these get ''tarnished'' the finish becomes very matte and rather than being darken like we usually see on polished brass it's actually whiten in a way. Either way it look very bad. Luckily this type of tarnishing came off very easily with Brasso. The whole fan cleaned up very nicely including the cane of the blades that very dirty. It now looks in almost new condition.

Mechanically it's in good condition. Like a lot of SMC'S with these blades it has a wobble on medium and high speed. I was able to reduce it with a balancing kit.

This is a rather uncommon NON reversible variant sold exclusively at Sears around 1982-1983 so it uses a wall control for the speeds. The switch housing serves the purpose of holding the capacitor and making the fan light kit adaptable. As a matter of fact it came with a genuine Sears short arm triple tulip light kit.

It has a full one piece metal canopy which I like a lot better than canopies that come off in two halves. It uses a conventional rubber pulley stucked between a shackle for mounting rather than one that can be removed easily when the fan is not installed. The extension pole on this one is particulary short which makes it more difficult to install.

I get a very nice range of speeds and a nice slow low speed using it with a 4-speed slider control. About 35/90/125/240 RPM. Very powerful fan!









Enjoy!

[Tais]

Awesome find!

1982-1983 is the last of the good powerful SMC spinners era, before the stators and winding structure was changed in around november 1983

Im curious to find out how the windings in the stator looked like, whether the run and start were close to each other it looks like an overlap and seperated by gasket sheets like how union industrials and CEC had them, or completely seperated run and start windings with plastic seperation between winding and stator (like many newer fans nowadays)

[Jean Lemieux]

Oct 15, 2021 16:19:26 GMT -5 Tais said:

Awesome find!

1982-1983 is the last of the good powerful SMC spinners era, before the stators and winding structure was changed in around november 1983

Im curious to find out how the windings in the stator looked like, whether the run and start were close to each other it looks like an overlap and seperated by gasket sheets like how union industrials and CEC had them, or completely seperated run and start windings with plastic seperation between winding and stator (like many newer fans nowadays)

Thanks!

Being sold mostly in 1982 and 1983, this variant must have been manufactured mostly in late 1981 and all of 1982.

I thought the last year for good and powerful SMC's were made in 1988. In 1989 SMC downsized and drastically changed thier motors on most of thier models including the Lagunas. Earlier 132 cm Lagunas like this one seems to use the same motor as on an SMC K56. As a matter of fact the serial number does mention the K series on it along with the KB (Laguna) series. The screws on top of the motor holding the motor togheter are the long and narrow kind which I believe were used on the K series for a while and on other SMC's spinners.