Long story short, I recently had a visit (which was lots of fun) from  silverpetdragon I was taking her for a ride in my '65 VW Beetle, and then it started to make a horrible rattling noise. I pulled over to see what was the matter. She said it sounded like the fan, but I was skeptical. I mean, I built the engine myself!

Yep. She was right. Here is the fan. As you can see, the hole in the middle is completely wallowed out. It is also obvious that it was scraping against the fan shroud. Basically, it was just spinning around on the shaft, all in business for itself. I'm not exactly sure as to what caused it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that it was on a racing engine...

For those of you who don't know, old VWs are air cooled. That means that this fan does all of the cooling for the engine. Without it, the engine has no real cooling! I pulled the fan belt off and I drove it back, making sure that the engine wasn't going to overheat. We made it back with no problems, other than that!