stark
Member
Many of you know me from the vacuum groups on Facebook and this thread is dedicated to my first vintage vacuum restoration and my first thread here on VacuumLand. I have another restoration (Heritage II) that I will be putting up later on.
This machine was posted up with 7 other vintage 500 series vacuums on the Facebook group Vac U Friends. This 518 stood out to me more than the others as it was in very bad condition and I figured it would be a fun project. This restoration took me around 4 weeks working on something everyday, I am still waiting on a couple other parts to come in from a fellow collector that has new old stock grey wheels and a few other things.
The bag is not original obviously but the seller on eBay did not have any of the correct style in stock anymore so this one was the second best looking. Everything was cleaned and polished using a bench grinder with brown, white and red rouge sticks after wet sanding each part with 320-2000 grit sand paper.
The bearings are good and the motor brushes are around half used and still usable. I put in a new belt and ball bearing 13 inch brush roller too. I have to give a shout out to Kent at Kirby Needs for having most of the parts that I needed for the project.
This vintage Kirby is going to be retired and will continue to be cared for meticulously by myself as it resides next to his younger Kirby brothers (Sentria II and Heritage II). If this machine could talk about its 58 years I would love to hear the stories... it saddens me to think the original owner has probably passed away. Anyway enough talk... here's the before photos.
This machine was posted up with 7 other vintage 500 series vacuums on the Facebook group Vac U Friends. This 518 stood out to me more than the others as it was in very bad condition and I figured it would be a fun project. This restoration took me around 4 weeks working on something everyday, I am still waiting on a couple other parts to come in from a fellow collector that has new old stock grey wheels and a few other things.
The bag is not original obviously but the seller on eBay did not have any of the correct style in stock anymore so this one was the second best looking. Everything was cleaned and polished using a bench grinder with brown, white and red rouge sticks after wet sanding each part with 320-2000 grit sand paper.
The bearings are good and the motor brushes are around half used and still usable. I put in a new belt and ball bearing 13 inch brush roller too. I have to give a shout out to Kent at Kirby Needs for having most of the parts that I needed for the project.
This vintage Kirby is going to be retired and will continue to be cared for meticulously by myself as it resides next to his younger Kirby brothers (Sentria II and Heritage II). If this machine could talk about its 58 years I would love to hear the stories... it saddens me to think the original owner has probably passed away. Anyway enough talk... here's the before photos.
