When I met the mrs, she had a Hoover Alyx. Nice machine to look at, but my god it was awful! Didn't pick anything up despite good airflow, I stripped it down and rebuilt it and it was still awful. It's at her mums now!
Another one, we were at my friends parents holiday home (without his parents, was a drunken mess of a week!), with deep pile carpets. The vacs to choose from were an old hitachi cylinder, and a DC04. After battling with the Hitachi, my friend pulls the DC04 out, and I express my delight and get to work clearing up. Turn it on, drop the head and.....it had a dead clutch. Que scrubbing the deep pile of this carpet with the Hitachi for hours on end. I gave them a Henry a few years ago and got good feedback from it.
As for explosive vacs, I had a Vax 2000 once, can't remember where I found it but I plugged it in and it exploded with a purple flash. OK, I thought, go back inside for some fresh underwear, got met by my stepdad asking if I knew anything about the bang and scorch marks from the fusebox, and why we had no power.
Turns out (partly due to old house wiring) that when the vac went bang, it surged from the garage phase into the house and took the old fuse out with a bang. My stepdad went through a period of running a multimeter over everything I bought home after that. I never did find out why the Vax exploded, it hastily got taken to the tip!
