My Ridgid shop vac from Home Depot sees moderate use and never disappoints.

i

On 2010-09-25, 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?

Doug White