Hoover Bag Cleaner: Rare Vintage Vacuum Repair Shop Equipment 

Here is an especially unique version of an already rare contraption: the Hoover Bag Cleaner. Made for cleaning the cloth bags of upright vacuum cleaners, this would have been built by Hoover for service centers during the 1930s. It used a "coffee can" type Hoover upright motor (in this example, one from a Model 800, though other examples with 700 and 750 motors do exist). The motor has a standard round Hoover upright belt driving a 105-style brushroll, which was mounted inside a long tube so that a cloth bag could be worked onto and around it. More common examples of this machine have an 18-20 inch tube and a standard upright-sized cloth bag, which hangs down from the unit. They were made to be bench-mounted or pedestal-mounted; the pedestal frequently being a steel pipe screwed into a flange on a wooden base. This particular example has an extra-long tube with an adjustable brush height, plus a heavy cast iron pedestal with integrated electrical outlet and switch. Additionally, a huge 5 foot long cloth bag with a loop for hanging from the ceiling, and a 3" cast iron elbow for connection to a central dust collector system (along with a connection for a Hoover "umbrella latch"- style flexible hose) make this a very special piece.