Ever thought that when something breaks, you should break it some more? If you haven't, then you might just be missing the solution to your problem. When this person's fan had pieces fall off, he just broke off a few more, and the fan was able to work again without any skipping or other issues. Is there a moral lesson here? If there is, then we guess the lesson is to break things.
Actually, though, this person was able to save themselves time and money by breaking off a few more bits and rebalancing their fan. Hopefully, it works as well as it did before.