EurekaLux FrankenCanister

[human]

So I've continued to play with the vintage Eureka canister I bought for a ten-spot at Goodwill earlier this month and I've really taken to it. Pairing it up with an Electrolux 1205 wand and PN4A power nozzle make a dynamite combo with it but for want of a short pigtail cord I have been unable to use a Sidekick with it. I've looked online to see if I could find a pigtail that would fit my needs but failed to come up with something that would work for a price I was willing to pay. Finally, I gave myself permission to think outside the box I was hiding my head in and began looking at turbo brushes as an alternative solution.

This led me to an Electrolux (modern Electrolux, not Aerus) model 28B turbo brush, which I acquired for the princely sum of $6.99 plus shipping, far cheaper than any pigtail cord I looked at. It fits right onto the end of the Eureka's hose, and when I turn the vacuum on, the turbo brush spins up into a screaming banshee of a cat fur predator. I was a little skeptical of how it might perform, given that my experience with turbo brushes to date has been kind of underwhelming, but now I'm actually rethinking my position on them. Any turbo brush performs only as well as the vacuum cleaner it's connected to lets it and this combo was never intended to go together in any engineer's imagination, but it's quite a performer, high-pitched turbo whine notwithstanding.

 

[kirbyklekter]

Someone once

gave me a bag full of turbo brushes to different vacs, I think there were seven. So I put one on the hose of a Kenmore canister with a new bag,lots of suction! So much so that the turbo brush screamed like a siren and then it started to vibrate really hard. I thought nah, this isn't going to work, too loud. Then bam, it literally exploded in my hand. Plastic fragments all over the place, it self destructed in seconds. I imagine it was made for a smaller less powerful machine. When you said yours screamed like a banshee, I thought I'd warn you because I got a cut out of the deal and it could of been a lot worse if I were holding the hose a little closer! I'd say if it starts vibrating and buzzing, be careful, maybe slow it down opening a hose vent or other. Just saying.

 

[vacuumlad1650]

I've had bad luck with turbo brushes. A well made one is as good as the machine you connect it to.
A cheap one isn't worth having around, they stall out no matter what.

Remember, if it's spinning too fast, you can always slow it by jamming your finger in it LOLOL

 

[human]

All in all, I still like motorized brushes better and would most likely reach for a SideKick ahead of this turbo brush. Until yesterday, my only experience with turbo brushes had been with sorry plasticrap vacuums that were too weak to turn the brush roll once it made contact with the surface to be vacuumed. The annoyingly high-pitched whine was not accompanied by any undue vibration but I'll definitely take your safety warnings to heart and open up the suction control on the hose next time I play with it. For a hunk of modern plastic, it seems to be fairly well built although the drive belt is ridiculously narrow. I guess that's to reduce resistance.

 

[human]

I played with the turbo brush some more just now and found that with the suction control on the hose wide open, the brush roll wouldn't even turn--kind of like most turbo brushes I've experienced. Opening it just a crack, like maybe a sixteenth of an inch, mitigated the whine a bit but still gave reasonably acceptable performance. Anything more than that and it just stopped. And compared with a motorized Sidekick, it's really nothing to write home about. One thing's for sure, that whine scares the hell out of my cats.