When I was opening up my Lewyt 44, I found this strange thing. It has a spring and a wire. When you pull the wire, it makes this plunger extend. Then, you push it back and it locks in place. Here's a few pictures of it.

This is the filter in place.

~~K~~

Here is that mechanism. Let me know if anyone knows what this is and what it's for.

And another! This is it pushed in.

And here it is extended.

And this is the underside.

That's all for now!

~~K~~

where does the other end of the wire go? I have a suspicion that it keeps the filter from being sucked into the fan.

Hey Kyle:

I believe the idea of that piece was to snap the filter tight when the top was removed from the base of the machine to knock any dust loose (didnt work real well). Alot of machines at the time had similar ideas.

Doug

Greetings!

The wire is stationary. I think you might be right, Doug...but that sure doesn't seem very effective! I also found when I was looking inside of the vacuum the capacitor for the television/radio reception thingy...so it won't disturb the transmitting waves. Just thought that was neat to see!

BTW: Has anyone ever seen a vacuum disturb a TV or heard a vacuum disturb a radio? I'll have to listen for it.

I shall report back soon!

~~K~~

Almost all household motors with carbon brushes used to interfere with TV reception. It was noise in the form of square(ish) shaped "snow" on television screens. It could also be heard through the speaker. Used to drive my Dad nuts when he'd be trying to watch the news and Mom would fire up the Mixmaster to mash potatoes for dinner. I think the noise was the same on Radio, but you could not see the snow. LOL. Not sure of this, because we only had AM radio, and if I remember my High School electronics, both the sound, and picture are transmitted on FM. Now, however with printed circuits, chips, etc. and cable/satellite, there is far less chance for the noise to be picked up. Now if the class would please turn to page 106, we will discuss resistors. There will be a quiz!

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Yes Universal motors even of today can cause Radio-TV interference.Remember the brushes and communtator of the motor act as a spark gap transmitter-the arcs generating harmonics that can intrerfere over the entire RF band-radio-TV.Hence the small capacitors installed across the brushes in the commutator to supress the harmonics.Modern sets are still susceptible to the broad band interference.Just becuase we have microcircuits and circuit boards-modern electronics are still prone to interference or even more so becuase of transformerless supplies and switching supplies and regulators.These like the universal motor generate harmonics that have to be filtered or the circuit the supply is powering will interefere with it.And the new equipment still has RF paths into it for the signals to be processed like before.this is also another-like older devices paths for unwanted interference-and could casue the modern devices to do functions you don't intend them to do.