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Oh my....

Robert <br
You seem to have some sort of ESP to be able to find these things. I'm sure you realize that you have found a wonderful item, with everything to it no less "sans the Beater- Sweeper, power nozzle" <br
Robb is right, if you can find that "Beater Sweeper", you machine will be worth a mint. <br
I've looked to find one for 15 years and have never found one. I need to move to Minne....lo <br
Congratulations on your very rare find, and keep it treasure it and never let it go <br
I dare say that this would be to many of us here, like your finding one of the Apex "Bouncing Basket" washer's <br
Lovely...just luuuuvvvvleee <br
Cha
a.k.a programcompute <br
 
Heard Back From Mike Hays

Fred, Holy crap, thats f------ gorgeous!!! I have 14 Lewyt's, three of them being the electronic. The two of them with the electric wiring in the hose and wands do not work. the third one, the power nozzle plugs into the front of the cleaner. I have won two blue ribbons with it in the cleaning competition. The low voltage thingy is inpossible to repair. Hope Robert finds the power head and it works.

Hope you all are having a grand weekend!!!

Best regards, Michael
________________________________________

PS - I am charging my camera batteries to photograph my Lewyt Big Wheels. Fred S. and others helped me restore it. It is a great vacuum.

Fred
 
The cliffhanger

Hmmm, who knew? Well thanks for all the info and excitement everyone!

So tomorrow when I go back to that house to pick up the washer, I'm gonna go through that whole house looking for the power nozzel. I didn't go through the bedrooms or the attic, the Lewyt was in the basement. So everyone keep your fingers crossed that I find it tomorrow! I'll keep everyone posted.
 
Beautiful Lewyt, Robert!

Congratulations on a wonderful find! My Lewyt knowledge is limited, but I think the Electronic models with the Beater-Sweeper brush were the last square big wheel models made, probably in the late 50's or early 60's. Doug Smith could tell you a lot more about them.
I have 2 Lewyts myself, one being the model 40 that uses cones like a Filter Queen (and was actually sued by Healthmor because of it!), and the other is a model 90, otherwise known as the "Golden Lewyt," made in 1957.
Jeff
 
Hey Robert!! Like the others have said, GREAT FIND!! I have exactly the same machine in my collection, with the power nozzle, but the hose is bad. When I can ever figure out how to get pics from the Kodak software to here, I'm going to post pics of my collection. Keep us posted on the pn and tools, as there'll be more people watching this than to find out Who Shot J.R.! Later, Trg
 
***Sniff***

So I went back to the sale to get the washer. I scoured the entire house and the only thing I found for the Lewit was the dusing brush **wipes away tears***. Oh well it would have been fun to have found the Beater-Sweeper brush. What does it look like????

But while I was upstairs I did happen to find this for $2...

4-6-2008-11-31-58--Unimatic1140.jpg
 
Oh here is the dusing brush. Fred getting some extra bags would be wonderful! If anyone sees parts for this Lewyt for sale please let me know. Thanks everyone!

Oh and is there a modern bag that would fit this machine???

4-6-2008-11-33-19--Unimatic1140.jpg
 
Robert:

Congrats on the Lewyt. Knowing you and that silver flute, you'll whistle up a power head soon enough!

I have a question for you- you found a Compact C-2 a while back; that's the vac I grew up with. How do you like it? I remember ours as having phenomenal suction and being very quiet. I just bought a TriStar CXL, made sometime in the '80s, which is a slightly updated version of the same machine. Greg (gansky1) has one of these, too. The CXL reminds me very much of our C-2.

Have you used the Polish-Aire on the Compact?
 
I have a spare bag of bojack big wheel bags sans the dirt viewing strip on them. You might want to keep those originals for special occasion show and tell authenticity. Send me an email.
 
AC not DC

I've just taken some power measurements on the Lewty. It seems that there is 3.2 volts AC of power going into the beginning of the hose and 2.6 volts AC coming out at the end of the wands. I would expect the voltage to drop 0.8 down since it is so low and has to travel around the entire hose and down the wands, so this should be normal. The power being generated is AC not DC, in order for the power to be DC, they would have had to install a transformer which would have been very costly at that time and it probably would have needed a glass vacuum tube. Unless of course there is something I'm missing in my head. Does anyone know what the voltage should be to run the beater? 24 volts AC would be way to high to run down exposed wands, but 2.6 volts would be generally safe, but is that enough to run the power head? What did this power head look like???

By the way I was able to get the wands to generate a spark by touching a probe from the meter onto the lead and wand at the same time. No Lilt Home Permenants needed for our housewives with this baby!

Oh and Electrolux tank bags fit this cleaner just fine, albeit smaller than the Lewyt bags.
 
Although not the exact same one...

Here's Mike's Lewyt (mentioned above), with the external cord that ran up the wands, down the hose, and somehow connected to the cleaner. Pictures are from the convention in Louisville...

I would imagine that the design of the powerhead, or "Beater Sweeper" would have been somewhat similar.

IMG_6733.jpg
 
Hi Everyone

I'm out of town at the moment so not checking in very often. You needed information on the Lewyt Electronics so here goes what little I have so far.

Lewyt produced two models of electronics - the model 111 - green - which I have (also without power head) and the model 121 - blue - which you have. The model 11 was out in 1959 and the 121 in 1960.

I've never actually found out the voltage for the powerhead but the machine's motor had a secondary winding on it that produced the lower voltage, as an isolated circuit, to run it. Unfortunately Lewyt chose to use the machine body and wands as one pole of the contact. The insulation on the winding was poor and, in the course of running broke down, causing the 110 volts to short through. This in turn gave alot of people shocks as they came in contact with the now, no longer isolated, and charged with 110 Volts parts of the wand and machine. This resulted in a number of lawsuits which, in 1961 or 62, bankrupted the company.

Because the secondary winding is a non removable part of the motor it is pretty much impossible to repair. I have toyed with the idea of putting in a plain motor and a transformer but, again, I dont know the voltage required and, with limited space, it would be hard to get a transformer to fit that was also large enough to provide a sufficient current for the power head motor.

The molds for the attachments and rights to the Lewyt name were purchased by the Shetland Mfg. Corp and the patents and molds for the big wheels machines were purchased by Holland Electro (Which continued to produce them into the 80's in Europe - without the power heads :) )

The power head did run on AC to my knowledge. All the parts for both machines were white and the attachment set should include dusting brush, small nozzle, crevice tool and floor brush.

Hope that helps (If anyone finds a Green powerhead I need one too :) )

Doug
 
Doug, thank you for the explanation, now it all makes sense about what's going on in there. I cannot believe they did that, this vacuum is very dangerous. I should probably open it up and temporarily disconnect the connection between the secondary windings and the hose nozzle port.

Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't you just use the same motor and disconnect the connection to the secondary windings. Then take a power resistor (of significant ohms) and branch off of the hot side of the power cord to bring down the voltage to what ever the requirements of the power nozzle are? Then connect a wire from the output of the resistor to the metal nozzle port. The only problem here is that the power cord isn't polarized, so if you plug it in the wrong way you will get zero voltage to the hose, but then you would simply pull the plug out of the wall socket and turn it around and re-plug it back in.

So anyway, I was vacuuming with the Lewyt tonight using the dusting brush and I was turning it on and off as I moved things around to be dusted. So after about five or so of these on/offs I switched it back and nothing, now power. Hmmmm. So I measured the power at the wands with the switch on suddenly its 23 volts AC, yikes! Looks like this baby is gonna head downstairs to the workshop and get in line with everything else lol.
 
Hi again:

If your planning on using it disconnecting the secondary wouldnt be a bad idea.

A resistor, however wouldnt work very well for the PN. To begin with you would have to have an extremely large one to handle the current that a low voltage motor would require. At the same time you would be creating a non isolated circuit so, by merely plugging in the machine with the wrong side of the plug in the hot connection, you have now charged the body of the machine with 120 V. All it would take is for you to accidentally touch something that is grounded and you would get a hell of a shock at the least. Basically it would be creating the same conditions that the shorted winding did.

The safest way would be to use an isolating transformer.

LOL - It seems to me that I remember someone saying at one time that 24 Volts was the proper voltage for the powerhead. Seems your motor may have quit but the secondary is now working properly. Figures
 

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