Before and After!

[vintagehoover]

Hey everyone!

I'm always interested by 'Before and After' pictures of restorations and rennovations. Here are a few of my own, I'd love to see other people's!

Model 700:

 

[vintagehoover]

Model 800

Model 800:

 

[vintagehoover]

Model 900

Model 900:

 

[vintagehoover]

Model 543

Model 543:

 

[vintagehoover]

Model 925

Here's one of my favourite 'Before' pics - there's no 'After' as yet because I haven't quite finished working on it. Notice the very unusual bag (gold lettering rather than white, double-layered lower section to guard against wear and leather patches at the bottom to protect it from the bag-securing catches!), and the double-cord set of hooks for the extra-long cord!

 

[myhooverco]

WOW...what beautiful Hoover Cleaners. You do excellent work. These great machines really do deserve to be preserved and appreciated. I bet they sound as good as they look! Thanks for the pictures!!!!

--Tom

I never think to take a before picture...I always take an "after" instead.

 

[vintagehoover]

Thanks Tom - they do indeed run like new, and since getting a digital camera with the ability to record sound as well as movie clips, I will eventually be able to provide footage of them in action...I just need to find a free moment to do some filming!

 

[charles~richard]

Yes, quite beautiful

and the finish is appropriate. Stan Kann often frets when people highly buff out the finish on the 700s, 800s and 900s. He often declares that when they were new, they were not "glistening like chrome" but had more of a matte, hand-rubbed finish.

A puzzlement about your 900 and 925. I had a 925 once upon a time but it was slightly different than yours. It had the same headlight housing with the dramatic streamlined "rays," but also had the curlycues" in the top of the brush housing as your 900 has; and it had a black and silver triangular Hoover medallion.

Your 900 has the curlycues and not the rays, and your 925 has the rays but not the curlycues!

Also, the medallion on yours is different from mine, as is the bag. (I also had an 825 once upon a time, and I believe it had the bag that your 925 has.)

Could there have been more than one version of the 925?

That was one of the machines I let ago during the tragic near-move-out scare a couple years ago, and now I really regret seeing it go. To me it's the most beautiful of that type of design -- the ones with the exposed motor housing, pre-150 style.

In fact, you can see my 925 in the link below, on my "museum" site. You can clearly see the details, including the original bag. It also had the fully intact long rubber handle grip and, I believe, still had the original bag roll-up spring at the top.

Oy vey... WHAT was I thinking when I got rid of it?! (Anyone have one they want to pass on to a good home, haha?!)

According to Stan Kann, the 900 and 925 were commercial models -- a little heavier-duty than the 800 and 825. The 925 does weigh a good bit more and, if I recall correctly, has a slightly longer handle.



http://www.137.com/museum/hoo925.jpg

 

[vintagehoover]

Charles - I've long-admired the 925 on your site - I doubt mine will ever look as good as that, even after restoration! I just have to be glad I have one at all, since they're notoriously difficult to find over here!

Did your 925 have the additional set of cord hooks on the other side of the handle? I can't tell from the photo...

All Hoover models beginning with 9 (961/972/900/925/960/912 etc...) were commercial machines - see the 'Commercial Machines' page on my site for more details! I don't think the handle is longer than my other machines, but the roller for the bag retracting cord is mounted higher up, because the commercial machines had a larger bag than their domestic sisters.

My machine does in fact have the wings engraved either side of the badge, but they don't show up in the picture because the black paint which emphasises them had peeled away. The badge itself is the brass-type, and would have been orange originally, like the 700/725/750, but again, the paint has peeled off. It also features the words 'An Empire Product' on the badge, meaning it was built in Canada before the Perivale factory opened in London. This makes it an early version, because later machines would have had the black-and-silver badge, and would have been made in the UK. Oddly, though, the motor plate states that it was made in Perivale...

I agree with you about it being the most beautiful of the pre-war machines; I love the whole 370/450/800/925 model range.

http://www.freewebs.com/vintagehoover/commercialmodels.htm

 

[charles~richard]

I'd forgotten...

what a great web site you have! Haven't visited in a while. And it appears that your 925 does indeed have the correct bag. I wonder then, which model the bag that was on mine is from. Tom Anderson, do you know??

And yes, now I can see the "curlycues" in yours!

Gee, I loved that machine... *sigh*

 

[vintagehoover]

The bag your 925 has in the photo is the one which would have originally gone on Model 825 - although both models may have used the same bag design, of course, so it could well be original...

The bizzare thing about the bag my one has is that when I got the machine, I opened the bag and there was nothing inside it; I don't just mean it was empty, it was like brand new - not the usual hairs which get caught in the weave, no dust, nothing...just clean black fabric. Even more amazing given the poor condition of the machine itself.

According to my very generous benefactor, it had sat in the cupboard of an old building for years before someone bought it at an estate sale and sold it on eBay to him...could it be possible it had just been serviced and provided with a brand new bag before being shut away for several decades, never to be used again?

Clearly, the bag is specifically designed for commercial models, with the gold lettering, and all the reinforcements, but is it original to the machine? I've never seen another one like it! Given that it's an early 925, surely its original bag should have matched that of the Model 800...who knows? It's a mystery!

 

[vintagehoover]

Here's a pic I took of an 825 at the Bakelite Museum in Devon - I think the bag is the one fitted to your 925.

 

[charles~richard]

Yes, that's it.

I think an idea many of us have is that "complete" changes were made to models by the various manufacturers all at once, and that once a model was rolled out no more changes were made until the next model came out; when that may not have been the case.

With Kirby in particular, I am pretty sure that some changes did not occur concurrently with the release of new models. What I mean is, the early and late runs of a particular model may have received changes during production, instead of waiting for the new model to come out. So yes, an early 925 could have had one bag and the late one a different one.

btw, what is that art-deco looking thing we can see just the edge of in your above photo?

 

[vintagehoover]

If we're talking about the left edge, I think it's some kinda electric heater type thing...I was mainly taking pics of the wonderful vacuum collection - I was so delighted to find that the museum had them, I skipped past a lot of the rest of them items (not literally, of course!), and didn't take photos. I really regret this now, there were so many fasinating things...

 

[vintagehoover]

That's very true, what you say about design changes being made along the way - there are many Hoover pre-war uprights which have 'early' or 'late' production details, often with a design feature being carried over from the model it was replacing, then being phased out as production went on for something newer - case in point: The 425 had 3 different original bag designs - the one on its instruction manual shows that it would have come with the same bag design used on the 575 (and also the 725 in orange). It also came with 2 variations of a different design, some with the 'Silver Jubilee' lettering, some without - I think Stan Kann mentions writing to Hoover to obtain a Silver Jubilee bag for his 425 in the interview you did with him!

 

[charles~richard]

Yes, Stan did talk about writing for that bag

AND THEY SENT IT TO HIM!!!

Can you imagine writing Hoover today and asking for an original replacement bag for a machine that old, and actually GETTING it???! A Brand New one???!

I have often fancied that there are closets or nooks and crannies in the Hoover plant where stuff like boxes of old replacement bags were squirreled away and forgotten about ... Tom A., how thoroughly have you explored the place?!

I also used to fantasize the same thing about the Electrolux plant in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, now long gone of course -- a condo development in its place. One time I wrote a letter to the then-president of Electrolux, a Mr. MacMillan. Forget his first name now --- asking about stuff for old models and wondering if he had photos or brochures from the past.

He wrote back saying, first of all, something along the line of, why would you want all that old stuff -- "I'll be happy to send you the latest model [Silverado] wholesale, shipping included." (I declined at the time but now wish I had taken him up on it!)

He went on to say that they had just closed the Greenwich plant and that many of the people had been relocated to the New York office, and in the process most of the archives etc. had been thrown out.

Years later I met his son who had contacted me via the Internet - he had found my Electrolux site. We talked on the phone a couple of times and he confirmed what his father had said -- that they had thrown out literally dumpsters full of stuff, including artist renderings, and actual design prototypes and model studies. Oy how that makes me cringe!

Just very recently I have gotten another email from a man telling me his father is included in one of the photos on my site. This man also worked for Electrolux in the summer during the mid 1906s along with his father, and he has confirmed the same thing --- that a LOT of stuff just got tossed out.

MacMillan's son had said his father did have several boxes of stuff, including old isues of "Electrolux News" that he would send me, but I guess he never got around to it.

Oh the pain, the pain........

 

[ohio_tuec]

I know Charlie, and believe me, I share in your pain hearing stories like that. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the people who were working for Electrolux at that time did not share the same feelings for vintage vacs as you and I. To them, it's just a job. There's no reverance. I wrote to Kirby several years back, and got no response at all.
A few years back, I worked for Remington electric shavers. When they decided to close their retail division, everything that wasn't sold to liquidators got thrown out. I was working in a store that had LOTS of parts for Remingtons going back to the '70's. I took everything I could, with the hopes of someday opening my own shaver shop. My dream was deferred when I got the job at Oreck, but maybe someday....

 

[vintagehoover]

See them clean!

As I promised, I found a few minutes (well, an hour or so!)this afternoon to do some filming with the digital camera I got for Christmas. So far I've done clips of my 543, 700, 425, 800 and 875 in action. More will follow - I would have done more today, but I ran out of space on my memory card! I've put them on Youtube because they're much too large to put on my site.

Follow the link below, you can find the other videos by clicking the 'More from this user' tab.

 

[charles~richard]

Oh, these are so great!!

Thanks very much for sharing them. I hope there is some way for Stan Kann to see them. Maybe the guy who does his ebay listings for him can show them to him. I know he'd love to see them.