Gas powered Vacuum sucks hard anywhere

posted Oct 10th 2008 12:58pm by Caleb Kraft
filed under: daily, tool hacks

[mdavis19] found himself in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, needing a strong vacuum. That happens to us all right? His solution was to hack together a gas powered monster vacuum. He found a shop vac at a yard sale and promptly discarded the motor and filter. Some minor modifications to a leaf blower and a plywood mount finished the job. He now has absolute sucking power as long as he has fuel. He describes how this is going to be used for gold prospecting, though it would probably work just as well on pet hair. If you’re going to use one around the house though, you may want to find a way to mount a filter in it, and wear ear plugs.

Comments [25]

tagged: gas powered, gold prospecting, leaf blower, vacuum

Reader Comments

Reminds me of the Gas powered Blender http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/3060000000046118.JPG

Posted at 1:35 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by twistedsymphony

Why would you need a filer? The Blower i have from homedepot is designed to collect leaves and small debris. just poke a hole in the side of the house and put a tube for blowing the dust outside, your done. Never have to empty a canister or anything.

Posted at 1:48 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by tomas316

Why would you need a filter? The Blower i have from homedepot is designed to collect leaves and small debris. just poke a hole in the side of the house and put a tube for blowing the dust outside, your done. Never have to empty a canister or anything.

Posted at 1:48 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by tomas316

He probably never mounted it with the dust filter, which would be understandable if your planning on only moving the air/particles from one place to another.

Overall though, this is a sweet design and a worthy hack.

Posted at 2:21 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by Cris Abbott

Vacuums should last you more than 30 years. With maybe 25 years left to go on oil, I don’t see this as very practical. I’m sure you can tell I don’t see modern vacuums as very practical since they rarely last past the first belt replacement.

Posted at 2:48 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by BigD145

@bigd145

I don’t find vacuums practical as they are very bad for indoor air quality.

The carpet holding disgusting skin and fecal matter, dirt, etc is bad enough (ever removed a carpet?), but stirring it around is worse yet.

I know of the “hepa” filter things, but they do nothing for the dirt “beaten” in the air by the beater brush.

The only vacuum I can get behind is the one that exhausts away from the indoors completely, and as a bonus it would have plenty of suction being a house-based unit.

Posted at 3:03 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by nubie

“[mdavis19] found himself in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity, needing a strong vacuum.”
camping penis enlarger ?

Posted at 3:37 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by therian

The company i work for has been making these or over 15+ years.

Posted at 3:59 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by John

This really needs the filter, and it wouldn’t have been that hard to mount; I suspect he got the used vac without a filter and didn’t bother to hunt one up. As it is he will blow much of what he collects right out the exhaust, and if it’s sand he’ll be abrading the impeller of his lawn blower too.

Posted at 5:58 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by localroger

I love all appliances gas powered.

Current project: gas-powered blender.

I’m having a lot of trouble miniaturizing. Coupling the vertical engine with the blender cup is easy. Doing it without having a massive, massive extra humongous waste of device volume is hard. I thought maybe just do it with a Wankel and make it huge? But how practical is that? :P

Yeah anyone want to give me an idea? I need a bigger cup and a smaller engine. But I want good horsepower…

Posted at 7:39 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by Dan Fruzzetti

Now that’s a man’s vacuum.

Posted at 8:54 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by epicelite

gas powered…seriously? should we really be spending that much time trying to make more gasoline powered products?

2-stroke or 4 you’re still just utilizing the intake/exhaust of a standard combustion engine.

how in the heck do you find yourself that far from an electrical outlet while needing a vacuum anyway? lol

Posted at 9:20 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by supershwa

You greenies who are objecting to a gasoline powered vacuum might try reading the article to find out why he doesn’t just use an electric powered one.

Posted at 10:05 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by DB

so a gas powered blender… use a weed wacker, retain the flexible drive shaft and use that flexibility to attatch it to the teeth that mesh with the blender cup. they work quite nicely and make a fine icy beverage while camping

Posted at 10:54 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by toast

@Dan Fruzzetti, look at RC car motors. they make some decent power and are of course tiny. and you get an extra 5 geek points cause its not just gas powered. It’s NITRO baby

Posted at 10:55 pm on Oct 10th, 2008 by kyle

I know several real life full time gold prospectors. None of them need vacuums. Though it’s a novel idea, keeps down the electrocution factor while prospecting. 99.99% is done around rivers and streams. Once again for the people bitching about vacuums indoors. Did you even read the article, or just start ranting after looking at the picture?

Posted at 6:54 am on Oct 11th, 2008 by barry99705

@barry99705, I did have a real comment, but it didn’t post, it may have been too long or something.

I think this is an awesome idea, if you add it to a 33-gallon trash can and use a long tube to keep the noise away from you.

Posted at 11:07 am on Oct 11th, 2008 by nubie

SSD? http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/flash_memory/40_pin_ide_flash_modules

$21 for 1GB. Use XP Embedded or XP with Enhanced Write Filter. Or Puppy Linux etc.

I like his bravado, but he should have started with a lower power processor 89w isn’t a good one. There were 65watt and 35watt models available of the AMD processors.

Kudos for the massive heatsinks, that was awesome.

I would love to have a mini-ITX based system with one of the huge (10-heatpipe) towers on it, based on a cube with an acrylic stand for the convection flow.

Use low-voltage processors and a silent power supply like these: http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.13/.f

If you leave the HDD inside, you might as well have a very slow 120mm/140mm fan going.

I would do some calculations and see what kind of surface area a Thermalright 120 Extreme or Scythe Mugen Infinity have, just use them whole, one for the video card too ;).

Posted at 11:26 am on Oct 11th, 2008 by nubie

http://www.mdpub.com/vacpack/index.html

Here’s the original project

Posted at 5:19 pm on Oct 11th, 2008 by LinuxH4x0r

Lol, I thought people would be trying to hack away from gasoline… nonetheless that’s pretty sweet. And Dan I want to see that gas powered blender, that would be a whole new breed of “will it blend”. You could throw in gold bars and get powder! ^_^

Then you have confetti ^_^

Posted at 7:34 pm on Oct 13th, 2008 by Ryan

Hopefully nobody is dumb enough to use this vacuum indoors. They might start, but they might not finish vacuuming

Posted at 8:30 pm on Nov 5th, 2008 by jack

makes me want to see a turbine powered vacuum. should be fairly green too, connsidering turbine efficiency (not to mention powerful)

Posted at 6:58 pm on Dec 21st, 2008 by isomer

Hehe, no way! Had a good laugh when I read this, hope I’m not going to be out of a job some day…

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Posted at 8:37 am on Mar 10th, 2009 by Alex v

Gas powered Vacuum sucks hard anywhere

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