Little Gray Mouse

[DesertTortoise]

It was spa day for the Little Gray Mouse, my Kenmore 3.1/Ryobi/Singer DLC thingie. It's not a high end vacuum, but it is a very interesting design and I like it a lot. I would love to see most of this layout repeated in a premium vacuum with a two stage fan motor and high quality materials. I very much like the use of a peripheral discharge fan. The two bulkheads have seals running around their full perimeter so fan exhaust can only go into the exhaust chamber and out the hole in the top. It was a fun vacuum to take apart and inspect.

It turns out the original cord reel works just fine. You can see that somehow the cord jumped off the reel and wound itself around the attachment. This is why the cord would neither retract or pull out. Once I untangled the mess it worked perfectly.

Lots of bugs inside. Blech. A couple of the big ticks I found in there made me think of a very low rent sci-fi flick many moons ago about giant wood ticks taking over a town.

I still have to come up with a way to keep the exhaust port cover closed. That is for another day. I have a bunch of clips and attachments used to assemble motorcycle fairings and I think one of these may be what I need. Too late to fool around with that for now. Once I do I can put some filter material under the cover and snap it shut.

There are 30 images so I have to post some here and some on a reply. These are of the disassembly and cleaning. Enjoy. I did.

 

[DesertTortoise]

Here is the reassembly and the glamor shots. This thing sounds healthy and has good suction. I hope I can find a turbo attachment that fits the smaller 1 3/16 hose because this will be a great car cleaning vacuum. I tried as hard as I could not to get the label underneath wet but I did and it didn't do well. Not sure how to fix it either. Sigh. I am pretty sure it uses a Eureka V bag and I have some ideas to urban engineer a secondary filter. Anyway it's an interesting little vacuum and I'm glad I bought it.

 

[fan-of-fans]

Good job. That is an interesting design for sure. It's cool seeing it all fixed up after sitting on ebay for so long. I saw a similar canister at a yard sale earlier this year. It was gray and orange though and may have been wired for a power nozzle. The only attachment I saw was the upholstery tool. But didn't look underneath as I didn't know enough to realize they stored there. Thanks for posting.

 

[suckolux]

Cool design, nice to get to see inside. I like that it seems to have a motor cooling fan separate?

 

[DesertTortoise]

Yep, the motor has it's own little fan and apparently pulls air in through gaps in the cord reel housing. There are bulkheads with full perimeter rubber seals on either side of the peripheral discharge fan so vacuum exhaust air can only exit that hole in the top of the vacuum body. No dirty are gets to the motor. I like the design even if the execution and materials are not so great. I's always fun to see another way of doing things.

Now if only my Electrolux "shop vac" had this layout! Oh the havoc that would have prevented.

Does anyone know if there are efficiency differences between peripheral discharge fans and through flow fans given the same motor turning each?

 

[suckolux]

that is cool then, like shop vacs I have seen.

 

[DesertTortoise]

Darn! Eureka V bags don't fit. Now I'm stumped. The vac came with a Kenmore 5042 bag and the Hesco parts diagram calls for an SCC-1 bag, neither of which I can find anywhere. A Sears C bag slides into the slot but the hole is way too big for the small hose.

 

[super-sweeper]

Duct tape to the rescue!!