After putting the new on in, I took my old one apart and applied a minuscule amount of 3-in-1 oil to the shaft. Looks like a reasonable alternative to a $50 replacement (I bet the factory in China got no more than a buck or two for this fan!). However, after finishing the job I read the comment above from No Film School and checked out the link. This is a great resource, and the new one went in without a hitch. The noise was only bad when the rpm ramped up, so I put off dealing with it for several days until I finally ordered a new one from Powerbook Medic. At first I feared it was my hard disk, but once I determined the location I realized it was the fan, I did a search that took me to this site and the video.

My left fan started making a God-awful noise a week ago. Of course, in the full experience it did cost me the price of the 500GB drive, but then that is incredibly useful, so I'm not complaining. With the machine fully assembled again I have that eerie silence that you experienced after fitting the new fan, only without having to buy a fan! I put things back together again, and now the right side fan has no vibration when in place, same as the left side one. So I squirted it with a tiny amount of WD-40. That really only left the shaft of the fan to blame. I looked at the plastic fins, hoping to see an imbalance there, but they seemed ok. I next tried putting some electrical tape between the fan plate and the metal holder thingy, but that didn't improve things at all. The left side fan doesn't vibrate at all. All of the noise had gone away, but there was still some vibration. I went further still, and removed the silver plate that you had removed too, and ran the machine again. Doing that helped prove that the fan was vibrating within itself, and not just vibrating when in place. When I got into the fan area I decided to be even more bold than you had been, and I ran my machine with the fan removed, but still connected.

Having changed the internal drive I was already familiar with all the screws to undo. It sounded so dire that I thought my hard drive was dying, and so I've upgraded the 200GB drive to a 500GB, and retired the existing drive to an external enclosure. I've had the dreaded noise for a little while, only mine was from, it turns out, the right side fan. Well, your wallet won't laugh so much, but you will. But you're going to laugh at how I solved the noise problem. Firstly, thanks so much for this page, it set me off in the right direction.

2006 macbook pro fan