Re: Vacuum Cleaners from Outer Space

Ick! Artsy vacuums.. I think a vacuum should look like a tool not like a plastic toy farrari. No amount of eye candy can make vacuuming fun.

I'd like to see a home vacuum made by NASA engineers! :P All function and little glitter. I'd buy that. It can be painted orange like the space shuttle tank.

Or perhaps a home vacuum designed by weapons designers using military specs. "Tough enough to suck up burning napalm." :P Perhaps old cruise missiles could be turned into vacuum cleaners :)

D from BC British Columbia Canada

Like I said, art and engineering mix like oil and water. You must be an engineer.

I don't think they're attempting to make house cleaning fun. More like exercises in ergonomics, which tend to make things comfortable, but weird looking.

I've seen what happens when NASA designs something without an industrial designer. The first space suit for Alan Shepard was a good example. Totally functional and totally ugly. NASA wanted something that looked like what the GUM (great unwashed masses) expected a space suit to look like. So they hired fashion designer Rudi Gernreich (of topless swim suit fame) to design them a real space suit. Gone was the green calendared rubber cloth, to be replaced with silver lame and a strange collection of useless attachment points.

Orange? Probably a prison vacuum cleaner.

Yeah, the military also hires industrial and fashion designers. I've never seen a mil-spec vacuum cleaner, but I can imagine that it costs about as much as the mil-spec hammer and ash tray. (I once worked on a mil-spec product. The product was worth about $1,000, but the paper work and testing added about $10,000 to that). I guess you could put the artsy clear plastic vacuum cleaner in a metal drum, attach a "not a step" decal, and it might sell to the survivalist crowd.

If I were designing a personal vacuum cleaner to match your bizarre tastes, it would include a back pack, dual cylinders, manifold, and attachments to make it look like a flame thrower. Battery or gasoline engine powered. For added effect, maybe some fuel injection in the exhaust for an afterburner effect. Sell it as the most powerful (and probably most destructive) vacuum cleaner with built in incinerator. Maybe add an LCD display and GPS mapping system to make sure you didn't forget to vacuum any areas of the house. I guess it can be orange, but methinks camouflage would be more appropriate.

Incidentally, the claim that it's "tough enough to suck up burning napalm" is a litigation magnet. Some fool is going to try it and some enterprising attorney is going to sue over the claim and the attempt. Such claims have to be realistic or there will be problems. Something like "more pressure differential than a tornado" might work.

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I think he's talking about the portable air conditioner for a space suit.

We had industrial grade vacuum cleaners when I was in the Army. Cast aluminum and stainless steel, built to last decades of rough use. Add to that, they only used a few models, so they could repair them, if needed.

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I'm thinkn if it's used by the military, good chance it's good. I can't imagine an army using one of those fangily plastic glamour vacuums that looks like a transformers toy.

D from BC British Columbia Canada

Like these?

They're specialized high tech vacuum cleaners used by the military for things like radioactive cleanup and explosion proof vacuuming. Yeah, I guess you're right. No clear plastic anywhere on these. No clue on the price, but they all look expen$ive.

Vacuum cleaner manufacturers seem to have bigger plans. How about a bomb disposal robot made by a vacuum cleaner maker?

It's not a robot vacuum cleaner. It's an adopted "pet":

Of course, vacuum cleaners have other uses: "Worker caught having sex with Henry Hoover"

It's been a long time since I was in the military. As I recall, we used a broom, mop, and bucket.

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Not very useful to clean out high voltage power supplies.

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Yeah ..That's the way a vacuum should look like. (Tiger Vacs). Very industrial looking. It looks like I'm paying for durability and not eye candy.

Tiger vacs might be expensive but if spare parts are stocked for a long time (years or decades) then it gets better. I might look for a used one and that still might be expensive if it holds it value.. A good thing.

I bet if anything breaks on those fangily spacey plastic vacuums, the spare parts are either unavailable (model phased out) or super expensive (cash grab method).

D from BC British Columbia Canada

I wouldn't know. They never let me near anything with high voltage.

I dunno if this is the current fashion in the military, but I usually use compressed air to blow the dust out of dangerous hardware. A vacuum cleaner can generate a pressure differential over only small area. If you have to get the junk out from under components, a vacuum cleaner just doesn't work. However, an air gun with 100psi behind it will remove the dust and probably some of the paint. If area contamination is a problem, I use a funnel made out of a plastic bag (or cardboard box) which is attached to a vacuum cleaner. When the air gun causes the dust to go airborne, the vacuum cleaner easily catches it in the air. That's the way I do computahs and server farms. Oh yeah... wear a respirator.

My office is in a building owned by a cleaning service. They do offices, hospitals, nuclear reactors, power stations, and such. Each have their own idea of what level of safety is required. I've skimmed the manuals. None of them even suggest using an air gun and compressor for cleaning. In 18 years, I've never bothered to ask why. Maybe I should.

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Vacuum cleaners were easy to get. We weren't authorized to have an air compressor without a 2" Ampex R-R video tape recorder on site.

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I don't understand the connection between the vacuum cleaner and the video recorder.

Incidentally, in college, I helped keep the AV studio alive. Standard ritual for operating Ampex helical scan recorderers was to have an ecologically incorrect can of freon head cleaner handy, and to spray the self-clogging heads when the video got noisy:

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Vacuum cleaners were available to any unit and department. Air compressors weren't. The only thing that would have justified our requisition would be if we used the original Ampex R-R VTR, which required a filtered and dehydrated air source for the tape handler.

I saw a lot of studios with an open pint can of freon based head cleaner sitting open, with a flux brush to wipe the heads several times a day. They used to sell it in five gallon cans, specifically for VTR use.

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And make sure that you have the right kind of air supply. The three common types are:

[1] Clean dry air. [3] Clean dry air that has a fine oil mist added to lubricate pneumatic power tools. [3] "We don't care if huge drops of dirty greasy water condense out of the [ air + water vapor + oil + dust ] stream" air.

The easy way to do a quick test of this is to blow tha air through clean white cotton for 30 seconds or so.

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Guy Macon

As will the same gun with anything over 13 PSIg... which is high enough to produce a sonic flow... any higher pressure will give more massflow, being the same velocity at higher density... but the cleaning effect doesn't increase much... unless your nozzle has a CD orifice to produce a supersonic flow.

Doesn't that stain your shorts? ;-)

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