Or at least our vacuum cleaner does, once again. The vacuum cleaner built by chris, Chris and papachaotica is aptly named Karloff. Why, you ask? Let me tell you a story of four broken vacuums.

Quite a while back chris sponsored a relatively cheap “industrial grade” vacuum cleaner. It was exactly that, relatively cheap and relatively short-lived with its motor dying on us during some maintenance work. Of course we couldn’t just throw it away so we kept it and even moved it with all the other stuff to the new shackspace location over a year ago.

Somehow we got a hold of another vacuum cleaner which had a working motor but a small dust bin.

The plan: mate the dust bin of the first with the motor of the second!

Removing the broken motor while retaining the mounting ring to fit the new motor into was accomplished by using an old soldering iron to slice through the plastic. The smaller vacuum was freed of its wheels and a hole was cut into its bottom side. This is where the air will be flowing through.
Then the second vacuum cleaner was mated to the first with the help of some screws and car body sealing agent.

Add the vacuum hose of a third and the tube of a fourth vacuum cleaner and you have a working device.
But wait, that’s just a working device, which is boring.

Colorful LEDs make every project 20% cooler so a few RGB-fading LEDs were added. Powered via a wall-wart power supply there had to be some way to actually plug that in. This was solved by adding a Schuko wall outlet to the top of the frankencleaner which is slaved to the vacuum’s power. Added benefit: you can unplug the wall-wart and plug it into a regular wall outlet and use the vacuum cleaner as a mood light.

Final touches were added by covering the no longer needed port of the second vacuum cleaner’s hose with a piece of plexiglass and fitting a high power LED behind it.

I for one welcome our new vacuum cleaner overlords!

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