20 years ago, I bought a Casablanca Stealth fan. That was back when Casablanca was still an actual company, rather than the mere brand name that it is now. Hunter purchased Casablanca at some point, flushed their entire product line, and co-opted the use of the Casablanca name so they could continue to charge high-quality Casablanca prices for what are, essentially, lower-quality Hunter fans. I don't remember the exact price that I paid for that original Casablanca Stealth, but it was easily double what the garden-variety fans were going for at the time. I didn't mind though, because that old fan is just a pleasure to look at and to use. Its quality of manufacture is on par with its cost. It is an obviously fine mechanism that runs dead true, with zero discernible run-out or balance issues at any speed. It's still operating as perfectly now as it was when new...and it has been running continuously since new! Even its wall control unit has a high quality, Mercedes switchgear feel to it. Sorry to run on about what the Stealth used to be, but it absolutely begs comparison to what the Stealth has become. The current "Stealth" is an extremely cheap knockoff of the original. It is styled similarly, but that's the only connection between the two. The original could be specified in literally hundreds of different color and texture combinations, whereas the current model comes in just two flavors. I chose vanilla (white). Just lifting the new one out of the box, I could immediately tell that it weighs quite a bit less than the original. Its housing is now a rather thin stamped metal that is spray painted a satin white, whereas the original's housing was either molded, or a much heavier gauge of metal, and was powder-coated in a beautiful white wrinkle finish. The fan blades on the original are cherry wood, while the new ones are painted gloss white and could, therefore, be made of anything. The light in the original was a small 100W halogen bulb, which I replaced recently with a nice 5000K L.E.D. The new unit, unfortunately, has permanently-mounted L.E.D. chips that emit a definitely-yellowish hue of somewhere around 3000K. Assembly and mounting of the new unit went as smoothly as that of any other Hunter fan, with one proviso: the fan blades on the several other Hunter fans that I've assembled and installed recently have all had a fairly positive mechanical location provided in their mounts. That is, the blades are forced to locate precisely when they are fastened to their mounts. This is a key feature when assembling what is, essentially, a flywheel. When a fan is rotating, precision assembly is very important in order to maintain the dynamic balance necessary to prevent wobble at all speeds. Those other Hunter fans had this feature, but the "Casablanca Stealth" did not. The Asian factory copied the size of the holes in the original fan blades perfectly, but they then failed to provide the metal locating sleeves that take up the space between the large holes in the blades and the much smaller retaining screws. That leaves some play in the mounts, which is an obvious no-no. I compensated by pulling all the blades outward before tightening the mounting screws, but come on. This suggests to me that there were bean counters, rather than engineers, in charge of the copying and manufacturing of this fan. Another tip: when I turned on the new fan, it wobbled horribly at any speed (there are six) above 1. One way that Hunter keeps the cost of their fans low is by skipping a few steps in their engineering and manufacturing processes, and then trying to make up for that fact by including a balance kit with each fan. Original Casablanca fans did not come with balance kits because they did not skip those steps and so no band-aids were required. The balance kits that Hunter includes will kind of compensate for wobble, if it's not too severe...say, if this fan had run smoothly up until speed 5 or 6, then maybe the kit could correct for that. But a fan that starts wobbling at speed 2? No. Something was really out of wack here. The design of the Stealth has cast metal tips mounted on the outer ends of the blades. Remember my flywheel analogy? The one place on a fan that will most affect the balance is at the tips of the blades, and this fan (and the original) has metal castings mounted there! So, I removed the tip weights and weighed them on a precision scale that reads in tenths of a gram. Four of the five weights were right around 60 grams. The fifth? 45 grams! The weights/tips all cosmetically appeared to be identical castings, but that light weight one could be identified while wearing a blindfold, just by holding each weight in your hand. It had to have been made of a different type of metal. Quality control is apparently not a huge priority in the plant of manufacture. Fortunately, when I contacted Hunter, they immediately sent me a new set of tips. The new ones were all the same weight, so I installed them and tried the fan again. Now it didn't start to wobble until speed 5. Grind teeth. I then spent an entire afternoon in a futile attempt to get this fan to run as smoothly as my original (no hassle, no wobble) Stealth. I eventually got it to where it has a slight wobble on speed 6, where it'll never run it anyway since it moves so much air that it'll probably never even see 5. However, the balance kit contains sticky weights that are made of a dark brown plastic. When applied to the top of my all-white, low-ceiling-mounted fan's blade, that nearly-black weight is visible on my fancy, super-stylish Stealth from most places in the room...and distractingly so. The new Stealth's portable remote has logically laid-out and easily manipulated buttons for all the fan's functions, and it has a non-slip coating. It's flat on the back, so it can be used without picking it up. However, being portable, it can be misplaced...unlike the wall control from the original Stealth, and the remote's overall feel suggests that it might not survive a trip to an uncarpeted floor. Oddly, it also utilizes a 23A battery, the replacement for which will not be found just anywhere. I have since installed three Hunter Antera fans in my house. One of them runs quiet and dead true, one of them runs quiet but needed balancing (again, not completely successful), and the third exhibits axial run-out (blades wobble up and down while turning), but not radial run-out (sideways wobble), while it hums and makes a slight scraping sound at all speeds. Hunter's lackadaisical attitude regarding quality of manufacture is obvious, but as long as people want their fans to be cheaper than they should be, this is the kind of stuff that we'll all be dealing with. The kicker here is obviously the new Stealth's cost. I paid about $650 for this fan. 15 feet away from where this fan hangs (on the other side of a wall), there is a new Hunter Antera fan that moves just as much air, just as silently as the new Stealth but, unlike the Stealth, I was able to put a couple of nice bright white L.E.D. bulbs in the Antera so, overall, the Antera is a better experience than the Stealth...at less than 1/4 the cost! As I said at the outset, I have no problem at all paying more for a quality product. This Stealth is just not that product...
