Last week a discussion was started among some ham radio friends about replacing the fan on a particular Kenwood mobile radio. While I don’t have that particular radio, I do have the Icom ID-5100, which I like very much except for one annoying thing. The stock fan is REALLY LOUD.  So I spent less than five minutes finding a good Google article posted by G6NHU about his efforts replacing the fan on his 5100.  He even posted a YouTube video with the before and after impact of the fan change.

I decided to order the fan G6NHU recommended and one of the brand that my friend had recommended from his Kenwood replacement. (The Icom has a slightly different size, but it was easy to find it on Amazon). I ended up trying both and the Noctua was quieter, as in virtually silent. I had to put a flash light directly on the blades to confirm it was working, because I couldn’t hear it. The other fan G6NHU recommend was also much quieter than the stock, but this was a situation where you got what you paid for.

Here are some pictures of the actual surgery. The toughest part for me was getting the fan screws out initially. They were put in with some sort of loctite and I couldn’t budge three of them initially. But 30 seconds under the heat gun and I was able to remove them. Then it was just a matter of cutting the special connector from the stock fan and soldering it on the new fan.

Here is a snap when I got the fan off initially.

Next up is a snap of the inside, it was pretty easy getting the bottom cover off and just un-plugging the stock fan.

Here is the initial test, to make sure everything was working before re-assembling.

Should note the super quiet fan is a three wire type, the yellow wire provides RPM data back to PC motherboards. Since I didn’t need it, I just cut it off when I was sure it was working.

Here is a picture of everything put back together. The fan is a desert dirt brown, which clashes pretty bad with the all black of the ID-5100 case. But the body of the radio lives under my desk and I don’t tend to care to much about colors. (Function over form)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2018 at 10:22 PM and is filed under Ham Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.