Electrolux Guardian Encore, Silver King 96B1, Royal 4750 canister, Royal 9700 upright, Royal 2075 upright, Royal 501 hand vac, Kirby Heritage II Legend upright
What are your dream machines yet to be found?
Handy Way Sani-Clean, Filter Queen 33 or 95x, Fairfax, Air-Way Sanitizor with PN, Sebo E3, K3 or D4, Lindhaus HF6, Lindhaus RX380, Sebo Automatic X-series
What are your earliest and favorite vacuum memories?
Helping my grandfather replace the filters on a Filter Queen, then using it to clean the filters on an Electrolux (that I think belonged to his boss).
What is the history of vacuum you have owned?
My parents used to have two Filter Queens and a 1970s-era Kenmore canister. When the Kenmore bit the dust, we replaced it with a Handy Way Sani-Clean (which looks like a Royal tank, but internally is more like an Air-Way, I think). Some point after this, my mother decided to try bagless uprights instead, and after bad luck with three Fantoms, wound up getting a Dyson clone that worked alright for a few years, followed by a real Dyson.
After I moved out, I bought a lousy bottom-of-the-barrel Panasonic canister, which never worked right. I replaced it with one of those European Hoovers with the 2300W motor (I was in Italy at the time), which was hellaciously loud and only a bit better than the Panasonic. That got sold when I moved back to the US, and I bought a Kenmore, which performed decently until it failed on me just recently. Before that it had never occurred to me to check eBay - but when I did I realized how inexpensively I could get high-end vacuums like Filter Queen, Electrolux, TriStar and even oddities like Silver King, and so I picked up an FQ Majestic (90s model) to replace the frotzed Kenmore as my daily driver.
Now Ive given away the Filter Queen, and ended up with two Royal uprights, a Royal tank, a Kirby and a Silver King. Eventually at some point here Im going to get something modern thats a lot less fiddly, though the Royal tank isnt terrible in that regard. Maybe a Sebo X7 for the upstairs and a Sebo K3 or Lindhaus HF6 for elsewhere.
Have you ever worked on, repaired and/or restored any vacuum cleaners?
Working on full restoration of my FQ - the power nozzle had a broken belt, broken retaining plate for the wand connection and a dead bulb, and the main unit was full of dust, probably from using bad clone filters. Its still a bit of a WIP.
