Doug White wrote:
I was looking forward to spending a good bit of the weekend making
chips on my mill. I'm making an aluminum sight base (weaver rail)
for a target pistol. Halfway through roughing it to size, I noticed
my "Quiet Suction Power" (Yeah, right) Shop vac wasn't running
smoothly. Shortly after hearing the motor rev up & down erratically,
I smelled zorched motor smells.

It's a 14 year old 8 gallon model, and it hasn't actually seen tons of
use. Milling chips are small, and I think I've emptied it only 3 or 4
times. Motors seem to be the weakness of Shop Vac machines (not much
else to go wrong). It died Friday night, so my email to the factory
about a replacement motor will go unanswered until Monday. I can get
a replacement machine from Amazon for $67. I found one place on-line
that will sell me the whole top head assembly for ~$90. If the motor
is more than $50 with shipping, I'll be looking for a new vacuum.

The only big objections I have to the one I have is that it's still
too loud to run continuously w/o ear protection, and their motors
aren't very robust.

The alternative to just replacing it with another one is to spend more
bucks to get something like a Fein, which is supposed to be very
quiet. I have a hose setup with a nozzle that is all configured for
standard ShopVac 2.5" hose, and I don't know how much fussing would
be required to adapt that to the Fein.

Suggestions? Thoughts? Comments?

I opened up one that started to smell "hot". ands discovered the one of the
wires on the motor going from the armature coils to a commutator had broken. I
soldered it back together, and the motor went back to working right for a while,
till it broke again.