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VacuumLand – Vintage & Modern Vacuum Enthusiasts

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bnsd60m9200, Matsushita Electric made most Kenmore canister vacs and all of their best canisters going back at least to 1971.   The first Kenmore 5055 bagged machines in the mid 1980's had Panasonic branded counterparts.  Look at Panasonics old V series canisters and you will see the same exact vacuums as the first 5055 bagged machines and the Whispertone series.  There were some oddballs along the way, Singer designs license produced in South Carolina by Ryobi and branded Kenmore circa the late 1980's.  I have one of these. 


I have an e-mail directly from Sears telling me that my "Heather Green" 1971 Kenmore 116.29971, a steel bodied beast with a plastic lid, is a Matsushita product.  They ought to know.  The same e-mail states that two more boxy cream colored plastic canisters, a two speed 3.9 model 116.22997 and a 1982 vintage 4.1 with an infinitely adjustable speed motor model 116.2399182 were likewise Matsushita products.  You can look those vacuums up on Sears Parts Direct using those model numbers to see what they looked like.  Those were not Whirlpool products as is so often inaccurately alleged.  Matsushita made some of Kenmore's best vacuums and more recently some of their worst. Matsushita started making consumer goods in the US around 1961. 


If you look at Panasonics current offerings, you see canister vacs that have features of the current Intuition models and others that are much more like the previous generation of the Progressive, but right now at least Panasonic does not offer a model identical to the current Progressive with it's one-off wands and tool system, and the Panasonic analogy to the Intuition vacuum does not have the same powered floor brush with an unpowered brush built into the top.  All of their vacs use previous generation wands and powered brushes and have thoroughly conventional tools.  So while Panasonic makes Sears canister vacuums, they make unique models for Sears that are not shared in their own model line.


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