An attempt at a new Royal hand vac bag gasket.

All cleaned up and fan motor oiled. Aside from some wear on the metal trim around the door button, this thing is super clean.

I found a turntable for it, but it is not cheap, so I'm going to swap out the Sharp Carousel II for this, use this for a week or two sans turntable to make sure it keeps working, and then I'll bite the bullet :apartyblobcat:

It'll also give me an opportunity to investigate the electronic issue the Sharp developed a couple of years ago, where convection cooking stops after exactly two minutes.

The big test :blobcat_dundundun:

Soooo... fuse and thermal switch are both fine. It looks good in here; no animal or moisture ingress. No sign of something having failed. Just normal microwave dirt. Maybe an electronic issue?

I think I'll put the cover back on, and just see what it does.

No turntable :blobcat_flop: But it's got the spinny ring at least.

Actually slightly older than my Sharp!

Just picked this up off the side of the road. Hoping it just needs a fuse or a thermal switch!

This is the lowest-effort YouTuber collaboration/product review offer email I've gotten yet.

They are going to build an AI data centre about an hour away from me. It's going to have a 190 MW fossil fuel power plant, and have a draw on the power grid equivalent to adding two more cities the size of New Brunswick's largest city. It will be the third largest carbon emitter in New Brunswick after the Irving oil refinery and another fossil fuel power plant.

I'm crying reading our article about it. I live in one of the precious few places on this continent where you don't get sick from breathing the air, and they're going to try and fuck that up. I had hoped that the bubble would burst before it got to this point, but it seems like that won't be the case.

People have protested the sale of electric cars here because our grid is so strained and under-maintained, and the cost of electricity here has skyrocketed the last few years. The cars are nothing compared to what this will be.

Before and after!

They might as well be the same picture lol. But it doesn't look worse, so heck yeah.

I need to figure out a new gasket for the bag. This one is crumbling apart and not sealing. There used to be a guy on the VacuumLand forum who made and sold them, but he's been MIA for a few years.

Also, I just realized that it should be pretty easy to design a 3D-printed adapter to allow you to use Royal Type G bags or some other obtainable disposable vacuum bags in these. I genuinely wish I had a 3D printer and the design skills to do that.

I would say this is the first time this has ever been washed. The water is nearly black, not from dirt, but from blue dye. Which made me quickly realize I needed to drain the warm water and do cold instead.

The amusing part of cloth bag restoration

I swear I didn't think I was a vacuum enthusiast

Interesting, presumably unintended, closed captioning goof on this instructional video.

In my old bedroom at Mom's house, which is now where she does indoor gardening stuff. I found this 2x20 fluorescent light fixture, complete with plant bulbs, on the side of the road a few years ago. Mom painted it this nice blue, and we finally got it installed on my old shelf for her to put plants on.

When you search "Leitch CSD-5300" on Google, the AI slop now gives you a very good rundown on the unit, referenced entirely from my two videos. Including the incorrect name I gave Harris Corporation.

I don't know what the whole NTP daemon Type 13 thing is, though.

Closest I've come to having my booty looted

Well, my vintage Royal Type A bags came... and the seller put tape and a sticker on the packaging, which tore it up when I tried to remove it. I have no idea what the damn tape was for - the pack was sealed and pristine in the seller photos. Disappointing.

I was looking forward to showing a pristine sealed pack in the eventual YouTube video. But, now that it's already tore open, we can look at the bags, because I wasn't going to open it otherwise.

I like the look of the Royal bags, although you never see them once in use, of course. These bags were made in or slightly after 1992. You can see the Eureka F&G bag is basically a carbon copy, even though they were never meant to be compatible with each other. I expected the Royal bag to feel a lot thinner/flimsier, but it feels and weighs about the same as the F&G. However, it's slightly more transparent than the F&G, so I expect the F&G bags have slightly better filtration.

Royals with 5.4A and larger motors with square-ended brushrolls use the Royal 1044260001 belt. That too is no longer available, but compatibles are still made. The Kirby 301289 works better on these machines because they have ball bearing motors, but from what I can find the Kirby 159056 (or Rainbow PN-2 belt) is still more appropriate.

Some accounts say that the 1044260001 is a suitable replacement for the 1043260001. I'm not actually sure what the difference is between them, but I couldn't get a 1044260001 for a reasonable shipping cost anyway.

The newest Royals (starting in the 1990s), which use hexagonal-ended ball bearing brushrolls, take the Royal 1672260001 belt, which once again is no longer made. With these, the Kirby 301289 is actually an equivalent replacement.

The Rainbow PN-2 belt is also known as a Rainbow D3/D4 belt, among a few other names. The ones I got are generic.

Finding a belt for the Royal 602 was a challenge, and required a lot of research. These are my findings in case anyone ever needs to know.

There are three different belts used in Royal metal upright vacuums, depending on the kind of motor and brushroll they have. Units with the 3.0A and 4.5A motors use a Royal 1043260001 belt, which you can't get now.

Most people say to get a Kirby 301289 belt, but others say that it will strain the motor and brushroll bearings.

The Kirby 159056 is a better-suiting belt. It is still a hair shorter and wider than the Royal belt, but it is more elastic than the 301289.

I could not find a Kirby 159056 with reasonable shipping, but one post I read said that a Rainbow PN-2 belt also works. I got one on Amazon, and it measures equivalent to the Kirby 159056.

The belt is probably a bit tighter than the original part, but the motor now sounds similar to some 3.0A machines I've seen on YouTube. Certainly, it's the closest you're going to get if you have one of these vacuums now.

The now re-re-capped power supply is working again! Shown here running my unit.

I happened to have 105°C replacements for the two bad caps. I'm going to let the 6 others keep going - they are so close to measuring fine that I only confirmed that they had degraded by comparing them to new units from the same batch.

Out of caution I opened up the power supply for my unit to see if it has those same two capacitors. Not only are they different, but I just happened to use 105°C units when I did mine - Rubycon XYJ instead of Rubycon PK.

So my unit is back in service and once again taking calls at 989-CSD-TIME (273-8463) and 506-408-0067.