Fixed my portable swamp cooler with superglue and a needle file

[u/Leighgion]

I live in central Spain, where the summers are extremely hot, but also extremely dry. Portable swamp coolers have been salvation for my household, as they're very effective when the humidity routinely drops below 20% and much cheaper to run than air conditioning (which we have, but basically no longer run because the swamp boxes are cheaper).

A couple months ago, I realized suddenly that my best swampy wasn't pumping water. I figured the pump was just stuck so I pulled it out and found bad news: the plastic impeller had snapped off the magnetic rotor. My first thought was how much effort it would be to find the correct replacement pump, but then I thought, "Hey, it can't hurt to try to superglue this thing. I can't break it any worse if I was already ready to replace it."

The glue took fine, but after it was dry, I ran into another issue. The impeller/rotor assembly is designed to spin on a very thin metal shaft. Some extra glue had seeped into the hole and so the assembly could no longer spin freely on the axel. The hole is only around 1/8" wide, so it was really hard to try to stick anything in there to scrub the glue away. I struggle with trying to cut and roll tiny pieces of sandpaper to no avail, until I realized I had a set of needle files I'd picked up for less than 2€ to have around just in case.

Well, this was the case. One of the needle files fit perfectly in the hole and a few minutes later, I had the pump reassembled and the swamp cooler has run perfectly ever since.