I don't generally have a great deal of interest in vacuum cleaners, but I ran across one of these in a thrift store last week: a 1955-ish
Air Way 'Sanitizor' 77. (Picture is not mine... me no have digicam.)
I decided to pick it up for three main reasons:
1. It looks like a rocketship.
2. It seemed to work a lot better than the vacuum cleaner I had.
3. It looks like a goddamn rocketship.
So $20 got me the unit, plus 30 bags and all the attachments, including a blower thingy for distributing moth crystals, and a... paint sprayer, apparently? Not sure if I'll be trying that one.
All it needed was a bit of a cleaning and some new grease in the motor bearings, and it was good to go.
The thing I'd been using previously was a 10-ish year old Simplicity, which did a pretty spectacular job of not picking up dirt. It's pretty much the epitome of plastic crap... although at this point I think it consists of more superglue than plastic, since something or other would break off of it about every time I used it.
So having something made out of metal is a nice change, as is having clean floors. Also, it looks like a goddamn rocketship.