Episode: 2604
Title: HPR2604: Restoration of a Fasco L55A Hassock Fan
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2604/hpr2604.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:27:14

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This is HPR episode 2600 and 4 entitled Restoration of a Hasco L55A Hasak fan.
It is hosted by John Kulp and is about 18 minutes long and Karimaklin flag.
The summary is, I talk about my recent restoration project of a mid-century modern Hasak fan.
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Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana and today I'm going to talk about something that was very exciting for me recently.
It's a project that I did kind of in relation to our new house.
The wife and I got, we decided after 17 years in our other house that it was time we wanted a slightly larger one with more rooms, more bathrooms.
Probably because my daughter is spending crazy time in the bathroom now that she's a teenager.
We bought this house basically equidistant to the university as my other one only around on the other side and it's in a neighborhood with lots of quaint old houses.
This one's from the 1950s. The date that's inscribed in the driveway concrete is 1955.
It's built like a tank. It's very sturdy. The walls downstairs are mostly tongue-in-groove boards, like ship lap I think they call it.
Upstairs it's all plywood, whereas most modern houses have sheet rock which has its advantages but it's not as sturdy as plywood.
It's a very solid old house. It looks like oak floors throughout the entire thing, upstairs and down, except for some terrassos floor in one of the rooms downstairs.
That actually just got polished up yesterday and looks fantastic. We haven't moved in yet.
I'm in one of the rooms in the house right now, what I call my reading room. We've got a bunch of my books over there and a stereo and one chair.
You might hear my wife bumping around in the other room. She's painting some stuff in the bathroom outside the room.
You might hear birdies tweeting outside the window, but it's very pleasant to be over here even though we haven't moved in yet.
The project that I wanted to talk about today is a fan that we bought to go with the house.
We got central air conditioning installed upstairs. It wasn't here before. We did some fairly extensive renovations to the house.
Things like taking the double door garage and knocking out the center support and putting in one big single garage door.
All new siding on the house, painting everything, getting rid of all the window units upstairs and installing central air conditioning.
It was quite a lot of new floor in the kitchen, new countertops in the kitchen and lots and lots of things.
It took six weeks or so. It cost us a lot of money, but we're pretty happy with how it stands right now.
One of the issues with this house is that upstairs the ceilings are fairly low. They're too low to put ceiling fans.
We were looking at options on how to have fans in the room. We thought, well, it wouldn't be cool to have a vintage fan that goes with the era of the house.
1950s house, maybe we could find a nice 1950s oscillating fan and install it on a wall or something like that.
So it started searching on eBay for vintage fans and it didn't take too long to come across this crazy kind of fan that I had never seen in my whole life called a hasick fan or sometimes called a footstool fan or a floor fan, I guess.
And as soon as I saw one, I wanted it. It's a really, really cool thing. It's like a small round ottoman that you could either put your feet on or put like right now.
I've got the remote controls for a little TV across the room sitting on mine, but it sits on the floor and the way it works is it's got a fan that's blowing air upward inside onto an inverted cone.
And that disperses the air around the room 360 degrees all around the fan.
And it's amazing to me that these things ever went out of style. They're so cool looking and so effective.
But I mean, maybe it's because ceiling fans got to be so prevalent and the ceiling started getting higher and people just find it more convenient not to have something sitting in the middle of the floor.
But I got to say I love this thing.
And the one that my wife bought from me. So anyway, I started looking on eBay at purchasing one and didn't pull the trigger because they all cost kind of more money than I really wanted to spend if they were in really good condition and running.
And then you had of course ship it, which cost a good bit of money because they're heavy.
And so it just so happened that my wife found a bed headboard for us on Craigslist. And when she went to pick it up, she noticed something sitting there near the headboard.
And she asked, is that a fan? And the lady said, yeah, that's an old fan. And so the wife asked, is that for sale too? She said, yeah, 25 bucks if you want it.
And so she texted me a picture of it and said, this is, looks like one of those fans like you were looking at. It's $25. Do you want it? And I said, yes.
So she bought it and brought it to me. And it was in working condition, but very dirty and had a cable that had deteriorated so that the power cable would need replacing and so forth.
And so today I just want to talk a little bit about it and about the process of restoring it. And I've got a photo album on Flickr that you can look at as you listen along if you want to see the process of it.
So I had never really, I had done one other project where it involved refinishing something metal. And that was a restaurant booth that we also bought on Craigslist about a month and a half ago maybe, maybe two months ago.
The wife found, for $35, a booth from a Chinese restaurant. So it's got like a four-mica table and two four-mica chairs or benches that seats four people. And we wanted something like that for our kitchen. So we bought that and it also, the frame was all rusty and dirty.
And so I sanded and primed and painted that and got some new feet for it. And now it looks terrific sitting in our kitchen down there.
That should probably be a separate episode if I wanted to talk any more about that. But it turned out well enough that it gave me confidence that I could do this project and make it look good also.
And so the first thing that I did was to start taking it apart and taking pictures as I went just to make sure that I could reassemble it the right way.
So some of the pictures in the slideshow are disassembly photos that show me basically okay here, the nut goes here, the washer goes below it or the parts overlap like this before you put the bolt in.
I just didn't want to forget how things went together. And so I started taking it apart and this fan was built in such a way that it wasn't that hard to take all the major components apart, which is important if you want to do a good job in restoring it because that way you can make sure to get all the surfaces prepped and repainted before you reassemble it.
Otherwise you're going to end up with little crevices where you didn't get everything sanded off right and the paint didn't quite go and stuff like that.
I was not able to get everything apart because the fan blade was frozen to the spindle, I guess you call it a spindle, the thing that spins around that's attached to the motor that makes the fan go around it.
There's a little bolt in there, there's a special name for this kind of bolt but it holds the fan onto the spindle and everything in that whole assembly was kind of frozen together and it just would not budge.
If I had been able to get the fan off I would have been able to take everything in the entire fan apart.
As it was since I couldn't get that off I had to improvise a little bit to do the painting but it all worked out pretty well.
So I got the top of it off, got the main cage that goes over the fan off and there are three side pieces that are attached together in a circle and three legs.
And then one top piece and then two chrome kind of finger guards I guess you might say to keep from sticking things in the fan while it's spinning one on top and one on bottom.
Got the top one off as a separate piece and the bottom one stayed there.
So once I got everything apart I started sanding with 220 grit sandpaper. I think that's as fine as I got. I might have used some 400 grit on certain parts of it but I just started sanding all the rust off and making sure that the surface would be nice and receptive to spray paint.
So it was kind of a time consuming laborious process but I really enjoyed it because the pieces I was working with are so nice.
You don't really see this kind of design anymore. The thing almost looks like a spaceship or something.
If you really need to go look at the pictures of this on my flicker thing and also I'm going to have a link in the show notes to a Google search for Hasic fans.
And if you start looking through the results of that you'll be amazed at just the amazing awesome designs that they used to have for these kinds of fans in the 1950s.
Some of them are just beautiful.
So I spent I don't know six or ten hours or so just very carefully sanding every surface.
You'll see that each of the side pieces has a number of holes and grooves and stuff and so I would slide the sandpaper through there and grab it on each side and just ever so gently go back and forth and sand it and make sure that everything was prepped and ready for the spray paint.
Then I went over to the hardware store near my house. There's a great locally owned hardware store called Gidry Hardware and Supply.
And very helpful people there who know your name and can find anything you want within a matter of seconds.
And I love going there instead of the big box stores whenever I can.
So I took sample parts of the fan over there to match the paint color.
So I took the top. I took one of the legs and I took a picture of the fan blade because I couldn't get the fan blade off and it was too heavy to carry it into the store.
So I took a picture and just matched as best I could.
So there are four different colors involved in the fan.
The top, when you're looking at it, it looks like a very dark purple but the spray paint that matched it was called some kind of brown.
I forget exactly what brown it was. The sides are a gold color and I have a little bit different gold on here than what was original.
It's got a kind of metallic finish to it that's a little bit different than the flatish kind of gold.
The best way to describe it might be that it looks like Iron Man gold from the Iron Man costume.
The gold parts would have this amazing finish to it. It really looks a lot like that. It's beautiful.
The fan blades were kind of flat brown and then of course chrome for the wire parts that keep you from sticking your finger in there.
So for all of the parts that came completely off it was very easy to spray paint them.
I gave it a couple of coats and let them dry very thoroughly.
And I've got a picture, like a before and after picture of one of the side pieces on there to see how it looked before I did anything and then after I sanded it and then after it was painted.
Since I was not able to get the fan blade off, what I did to isolate the chrome part on the bottom was to wrap plastic shopping bags around the other parts and tape them up real good so that when I spray painted
anything that was not hitting the chrome would just hit the shopping bags.
And then likewise when I needed to paint the base, which is the same color as the top, I wrapped the fan blade in a shopping bag and then I wrapped the chrome part that I could not get off.
I wrapped that in tin foil very carefully every part wrapped it up and made sure it would stay put and then I spray painted all around it.
It's not as good a job as that I could have done if I had been able to take all the pieces off but it turned out really nice anyway.
So the last part of the project was to replace the power cord and this didn't go as cleanly as I wanted it to.
I get the idea that the solder they used in the 1950s was considerably more robust than what's used on the small electronics than I've worked on.
I had my soldering iron on the highest setting and let that tip sit on the connection for the power cable for a good 10 minutes and it didn't melt anything.
It just stayed there and so in my bill if you're listening, you might give me some advice on what to use, what kind of soldering iron will melt that solder because I still would like to do a proper job replacing the power cord.
What I did instead was to cut off the power cord at about 8 or 10 inches and then take the new power cord that I bought at Gidry Hardware and just joined the ends using these kind of tube connectors that I found where you slide the ends that you want to join up, one end to each end of the tube and then crimp it down real good.
And then each side once it was crimped, I wrapped it in electrical tape and then wrapped both sides together in electrical tape so that they would kind of stay put and then I duct taped a little bit of strain relief in order to have strain relief.
I duct taped part of the cable to the bottom of the fan with some slack there so that if you bump the fan it wouldn't just yank on the connections.
Anyway, it turned out really, really nice and I've been sitting here without it turned on for quite a long time and I'm starting to get warm so I think I'll turn it on so you can hear it.
Here it's got three settings, high, medium and low and normally I just turn it on low because that's plenty powerful but it's a very powerful fan.
I'm going to turn it on on high to start with.
That's probably going to be a lot of air going in the mic.
Let's turn it down to medium.
I block the microphone a little bit with my hands so that it's not just wind or blowing right in it.
Okay, now turn down to low.
And there it's going. It feels really nice when you're sitting near it.
Like the feel of the room, the temperature feels like it's dropping down, I don't know, five degrees or so, which can really make a difference.
Right now we've got the temperature set to 78 Fahrenheit up here and having the fan on it feels more like about 74 and 72.
I don't know, it feels really nice.
Anyway, I guess that's probably about all there is to say about this thing.
I really, really love it. I want to get another one now and do another restoration project and that way we can have more than one room.
I recommend if you see one of these at a junk shop or something, pick it up, restore it, enjoy it.
I think you'll be glad that you did.
Next time, I will probably talk about my vintage radio that I got.
Anyway, that's all about the FASCO L-55A Haskell fan, a mid-century modern floor fan.
And this has been John Colpin, Lafayette Louisiana. Talk to you guys later.
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