The 702
Though few of these cleaners ever came my way for repair, one thing I do remember is they had a by-pass motor, the likes of which one only ever saw on wet & dry combination cleaners. When I first saw this, and I'm going back a good deal of years, I remember wondering if the cleaner had a secondary function, such as a wet sprayer, and the by-pass motor was there as an extra form of protection, should water penetrate the dust bag. I quickly dismissed the idea, because were this so, the motor would almost certainly have required earthing to the mains, which was something this cleaner did not have.
It is also not beyond the realm of possibility that when one considers wet & dry cleaners were not heard of in the UK when the Goblin 702 went into production, that the 702 was a cleaner built to trial the new by-pass style motor under normal dry vacuuming conditions. The first domestic wet & dry cleaner would have probably been the Aqua Vac, built by Shop-Vac. It was Shop-Vac of course who went on to purchase the Goblin company back in the early 1980's, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the connection went back even further than that, with Goblin trialling the motor. This is all suggestion on my part of course, but whatever the reason, making and fitting a by-pass motor would not have been cheap, hence the cost being passed to the consumer.
Goblin were foolish I feel to try and enter the higher priced end of the market, for whatever reason the chose to do so. They had a reputation for making average quality products at below-average prices, and I don't ever remember them struggling to sell to their target consumer. Considering the fact that the 702 didn't even have a cordwinder of any variety (let alone an automatic one), it was rather odd to attempt to sell it for more than the Electrolux 100.
</span>
