Miele S5210.

It’s a Miele S5210. It’s a very, very good vacuum cleaner. Well, it was until the point that it broke! Actually I was somewhat responsible for that. For a little while now I have been restoring a car (OK, almost 6 years but I am nearly done – www.asciimaton.co.nz/pics). After weeks of filling and sanding of filler I finally sent it off to the panel beaters to be painted. This left me with a garage full of sanding dust. I swept up what I could the used the vacuum to clean up the rest. Unfortunately your average house vacuum isn’t really designed to handle lots of very, very fine filler dust. I ended up clogging it up and the motor stopped running smoothly and instead started stuttering. I needed to take the vacuum cleaner apart to clean it and remove all the dust so it would run properly again. What follows is the procedure I used to take the vacuum cleaner apart. I imagine the process is probably similar to other Miele vacuum cleaner models.

I was inspired to do this page after I found the following page online for a different Miele model (a Miele s300): http://www.sannerud.com/house/miele.html

You don’t need many tools to take the vacuum cleaner apart. Just a Torx T20 driver and a small flat screwdriver to push on the plastic clips that holds the parts together. All the screws used to hold it together are the same. The Torx bit shown here is actually a tamper proof Torx bit with a hole in the middle but it works fine on the screws. Click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

Torx screw and T20 Torx driver bit.

First unplug the vacuum cleaner and remove the bag and all the filters. The small silver honeycomb filter just clips in place. Remove this so you can then remove the lid.

The clips holding the lid on.

The lid just slides onto the hinges and two small square clips hold it in place as shown above. Depress the small squares and then slide the lid off the hinges.

Large honeycomb filter.

The large honeycomb filter is also just clipped in place. Carefully push back the two clips shown circled above and the filter should come out.

Rear plastic piece.

The plastic piece at the rear between the two buttons is also just held in place by clips. Brute force will remove this. Just yank it upwards and it will pop loose.

Removing the speed selector.

With the rear cover removed you should see two screws holding the speed selector part in place. Remove these.

Clips holding speed selector in place.

With the two screws removed the speed selector can be removed by pushing in the small clips that hold the front of it in place and lifting it off. This piece just contains the knob that controls the speed. The knob has a stalk that sticks down underneath it that fits into a selector switch on the electronics board.

Top cover screws.

The top cover is held in place with four screws shown, two at the front and two down deep holes in front of each button. Undo these then the top cover should lift off.

Top cover removed.

Electronics board plug.

With the top cover removed you can see the electronics board. It’s pretty simple really and doesn’t have much on it. The board should be free to pull off now. The only thing holding it in place is the connector shown above. Simply unplug this connector and the board will lift off.

Inner cover.

With the electronics board removed you should be able to see the screws holding the inner cover in place. There are three at the back and one in the centre as shown above. Remove all these screws.

Clips holding inner cover.

As well as the four screws there is a clip either side of the cover on the sides of the vacuum. You can simply pop these apart by hand then the inner cover should lift off. There is a small rubber hose that goes between the cover and the cord retractor mechanism which you also need to disconnect from the cover (it will probably just fall off anyway).

Inner cover removed.

With the inner cover removed you can now remove the motor (which has a foam pad over it) and the cord retracting mechanism. The only trick here is to unplug the connector that joins the two together.

Motor connector.

The motor and cord retractor will simply lift out. I gave everything a good cleaning to get all the dust out. I used my air compressor to blow it all clean. With all the dust removed from the motor I sprayed it’s brushes with electrical contact cleaner. I didn’t go as far as dismantling the motor itself (March 2010 – OK, I did eventually See below!).

Contact cleaner for the brushes.

The brushes are either side of the motor and I simply sprayed cleaner into the hole at back of them.

After letting the contact cleaner dry I put the motor, cord retractor and electronics boards temporarily back in place the tested the vacuum. You need to be VERY careful doing this as nothing is properly attached and there are exposed mains connections that will bit you it you touch them (don’t ask how I know). Also the vacuum motor is extremely loud when not encased in plastic!

Once everything was cleaned and working again reassembling the vacuum cleaner is basically the revers of taking it apart. Make sure you reattach the small rubber hose and also make sure the cord and plug are free and don’t get caught when screwing all the pieces of the case back together.

After my cleaning and spraying the motor with contact cleaner the vacuum is working nicely again. I know now I should really get a nice shop vac for cleaning the garage and leave the Miele for purely domestic duties!

I can really recommend these vacuums. They are good value for money and very powerful. And now, having seen how they look inside, I can say they are very nice quality too.

Update March 2010.

I have had a few people comment that this page was useful so I decided to post the second part of my vacuum cleaning story in case people find this further detail helpful.

My cleaned up vacuum worked well for a little while but then the motor started stuttering again until eventually it stopped running altogether. Another tear down was in order. This time right down to the motor itself. Again the nice design of the Miele made this an easy job to tackle.

First you need to remove the motor from the vacuum as described above. Then carefully tap off the metal shield on the end of the motor exposing the blower fan. Next remove the nut holding the blower fan in place. Now it was a few months ago that I did this but from memory the nut is a reverse threaded one, i.e. turn it clockwise to undo it. This allows you to pull off the aluminium blower and the flat spacer washer.

Nut and blower removed.

Next you can lift out the two carbon motor brushes. These are simply held in with spade connectors so you can just pull them straight out. In the picture below you can see the female spade socket on the face of the stator housing.

One brush already removed. The other still in place.

The brushes are nice and long so should last a very long time.You can see the long male spade connector on the bottom of the brass housing. You can also see how despite my previous cleaning this brush is still covered in sanding dust. If I didn’t mention it above I should say don’t sand filler off a car (http://asciimation.co.nz/pics/page18.html) then use this vacuum to collect the dust!

Nice brush. Boom! Boom!

With the brushes removed (and cleaned up with electrical cleaner) you can remove the stator. There is a metal spring clip that holds it in place. If you press this down the stator should then slide out.

Spring clip holding stator down.

The electronic controller is attached to the stator and will come put with it. You can see the top of a TO220 type device sticking out of the top of the plastic housing. We get to that in a minute. The inside of the stator and housing were both covered in the sanding dust so I cleaned these up as well.

Stator removed. Note the electronics are still attached.

Next you can carefully pull out the rotor. This has bearings on each end and the lower bearing is a press fit into the housing. You need to carefully pull this out. The rotor will come out in one piece. Be careful not to lose the little flat spring washer though.

Rotor removed.

The observant of you will probably have noticed one of the problems with the motor. The commutator on the end of the rotor, that ring of copper strips the brushes rub against, are filthy and scored. To fix this I carefully mounted the rotor in my mini-lathe. You only need to grip it very lightly in the three jaw chuck. I made sure it was running true and turned it on. I then used some fine wet and dry sandpaper folded into a long strip to carefully sand down the commutator.

Rotor mounted in lathe.

I didn’t try to get the commutator perfectly smooth as I didn’t want to sand too much away. It still has a few small scores around it but it doesn’t need to be perfect. The deep scoring is actually where the edges of the brushes are in contact with the commutator so the brush is in contact with smooth copper on most of it’s face.

Commutator after sanding.

Next I cleaned up the aluminium blower which was quite clogged with dust. A bit of electrical cleaner and a poke around the fins with a long cable tie did the trick.

After doing all this and cleaning everything to remove all the dust I reassembled the motor. Since I had given it a good clean with electrical cleaner I left the motor on top of my dark coloured garage roof to make sure it was fully dry before trying to run it again. I wanted to make sure all the cleaner had evaporated out of the motor and windings.

Unfortunately after putting it back in the vacuum cleaner and reassembling everything (with a little Loctite around the rotor bearing where it pressed into the housing) the motor was still dead! I had to take it apart again. This time I removed the motor, opened that up and removed the motor electronics. Again thanks to nice design this module just unclips since it is held in place with spade connectors.

Motor electronics.

The electronics on the motor are incredible simple. Basically it’s just a TRIAC and what I think is a thermal cutout device.

TRIAC and thermal cutout thingy?

About now the problem was pretty obvious. This TRIAC was burned out! A close inspection and a little prodding showed that TRIAC was burned out. Two of the legs were not even connected to the body anymore.

Well there’s your problem!

I am not sure why this happened. I am guessing a combination of a badly connecting and arcing commutator and a motor clogged with sanding dust ended up cooking things. The TRIAC itself is a T2550h 600T which is a 25 amp TRIAC. These are available in NZ but not from the easy places like Jaycar or Dick Head Smith (who don’t really do electronics anymore despite their name). You can probably get them from the bigger suppliers like Farnell or RS but they would cost a bomb and you might not be able to buy just one. So I looked on eBay and found someone in the UK sells them for just a couple of quid. I ordered one of them.

This is the data sheet for this particular part: http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet/stmicroelectronics/6697.pdf

Once that arrived a week or so later it was a simple matter to unsolder the dead part and solder in the new TRIAC. I reassbmbled everything again (after this many time apart you get good at this bit) and finally everything was working again!

All that was actually done several months ago and the vacuum cleaner is still working happily now. I know these things aren’t supposed to be customer serviceable but it is nice to see that they are engineered in a way that means a customer with the right skills can successfully get in there and fix things.

My house and separate garage.

One thing that always worries me about being in the garage is making sure no one goes into the house (and vice-versa). Locking the doors each time I go from one to the other quickly becomes annoying so instead I decided to make a little door alarm. Basically, when I am in the garage, an alarm sounds if someone opens the front door of the house and, when I am in the house, an alarm sounds when someone opens the door to the garage.

To build this I used two small boxes, some magnetic reed switches, some switches and LEDs (with current limiting resistors), a six volt power supply and four wires of the data cable I had run between the house and garage when I had it built.

Circuit diagram.

The circuit is really simple. Everything on the left is in the house, everything on the right in the garage. Basically each little box contains a toggle switch, an LED to indicate the alarm is on, a buzzer and a magnetic reed switch attached to the door.

The alarm works by sounding a buzzer when the opposite door is open. So if you are in the house and have the alarm switched on the buzzer in the house sounds if someone opens the garage door. If you are in the garage and the alarm is on the buzzer in there sounds if the house door is opened.  The toggle switch on each box turns off it’s buzzer (say you are in the house and you know the garage door is open and don’t want it buzzing). The LED just shows the alarm is on and will buzz when the opposite door is open. The reed switches are wired so that the switch is open when the magnet is in place. The reed switch itself is attached to the door frame and the magnets are on the door. When the door opens the switch closes and the alarm sounds.

The power supply is an old 6 volt wall plug I had lying about. To completely turn off the the alarm I simply pull out the power supply lead.

Garage alarm box showing wiring and reed switch.

Garage alarm box (the power was off so the LED isn’t glowing).

House alarm box next to normal home alarm.

Now I can work in either the garage or house and leave the doors unlocked (but closed) and know that if anyone opens a door I will hear it where ever I am.

The skin is completely dried and is very tough and all it’s internals seem to have dried to nothing. I want to somehow remove all the flesh and just leave the bones (don’t ask why, it’s just one of those things you have to do).

What though is the best way to remove all the old tissue? Since my poor pet newts died I have nothing to feed the white worms they lived off to. I was wondering if I put the worms in a container, soaked the rat in water then put it in with the worms would they do the work of eating away all the dead flesh?

I know there are special beetles used for just such a purpose but goodness knows if they are available in NZ at all. Either that or some sort of chemical treatment?

Today, I finally reached 1000 empty Tic Tac boxes!

Please note, this isn’t a collection (or a 3 dimensional array). I haven’t actually gone out of my way to collect empty Tic Tac boxes. I just haven’t thrown any away.

For about the last 7 or 8 years.

The question now is what to do with the damn things?  Anybody have any suggestions?

In that picture they are stacked 6 wide and 6 deep with 27 full layers and a further 28 boxes on the top layer.

With 5 empty Sakuma’s Drops tins for company…..

After cleaning up all the parts I spent a week or so painting them. It all got several coats of thick hammered finish green paint or satin black engine enamel. I find engine enamel is a great, hard wearing paint you can spray metal parts with without priming. After painting and reassembling all the parts I needed to finish off a few things. First was getting a new motor. As luck would have it one of my night classmates  happened to have an old motor lying about. I think this one might be 1/2 HP instead of 1/3 like the original but it fitted the drill perfectly. The base bolted straight into place and the shafts were exactly the same so the pulley fitted easily. The motor came to me bright red and since I had some bright red paint left over for my old MG I gave the motor a quick touch up and left it like that.

With the motor in place I needed the wiring. I got two heavy duty power leads from Surplustronics for about $3.50 each. One I cut the plug off to use as the lead to the motor. I used crimp terminals on all the connections. The switch is a 10 amp toggle. I bought one then discovered I have several at home as well. I fixed that through the existing hole on the left hand side of the drill body. I used a missile cover on the switch meaning you have to flip open the cover and flip the switch to turn it on but you can just hit the cover down to switch it off. Handy when the think you’re drilling catches and starts swinging about like mad! Generally you try to avoid that. The drill is earthed and I tested with a meter to make sure all the metal parts did have a good earth connection.

The final thing was replacing the handles. There were only two of the original handles left and they were in a sorry state.  The third was just a piece of 8mm or so threaded steel. I machined up some handled from 12mm diameter steel rod at my night class and planned to get some bolts to cut up to weld into holes I drilled into the ends of the rod to screw into the handle boss. Unfortunately after going to two different Repcos I couldn’t find the 3/8th UNC bolts I needed. Repco are pretty useless for such things. They have a display stand for them but no stock. Rummaging about at home I found I didn’t have any UNC bolts. With an old British car I do have a lot of UNF but had no coarse thread bolts. What I did have though were two grub screws. They were perfect. I brazed them into the ends of two of the rods. For the third I just chopped off part of the thread on the original mismatched handle. With them screwed into place the only thing left were end caps. Traditionally there are plastic balls on the end of the handles. 1, to give you something to grip and 2, so you don’t poke your eyes out on the damn things. I couldn’t find anything suitable to make nice, round ends so instead I used rubber chair feet. These seem to work well and certainly make the thing safer to use.

Finally I added a couple of rubber buffers ( rubber fuel hose slit down one side) over the lip of the cover. These just stop the top rattling about.

Now it is all done the drill works beautifully. It spins very true and is straight with no slop at all. It’s better than the cheap chinese one at my night class anyway. Changing speeds is easily done by flipping the top, slackening off the motor and then repositioning the belt. I’ve already been using it quite a lot doing various small jobs.  Here are some pictures of the finished item.

The finished drill.

The other project I have almost finished is the Wimshurst machine. I am just waiting for the drive belts. Already though it can make 50mm or so long sparks just turning the discs by hand.  Once the drive belts arrive I can test the machine, paint it then write it all up.

I also finished the housing for the GPS clock. I just need to finish the electronics off now (adding a time zone changing feature) and then make up a board for it and mount it in the clock.

So, since all those projects are now nearly done I started working on the car again.  But that’s described on another, non-blog page entirely!

Lamb Shankets!

That’s right! Lamb shanks wrapped in (a blanket of) bacon!

Obviously wrapping ANYTHING in bacon is going to make it better but the lamb shankets actually turned out pretty damn well.

Recipe to follow.

Dinner cooking.

As promised my secret (shhhhhh) recipe. My mum gave me the original and I adapted it a bit for the slow cooker and due to laziness.  I cook these in a slow cooker for 10 – 12 hours usually, on low heat.

Put into a plastic bag:

1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds or powder.

1 small, chopped, dried chilli.

1 tablespoon of fresh rosemary.

1/2 teaspoon of majoram.

1/2 teaspoon of oregano.

1 tablespoon of flour.

Place the (defrosted!) lamb shanks into the bag and shake until they are well coated.

Then brown the shanks in a frying pan with a little oil. Any left over powder in the bag can be added back to the mix later.

Take out the lamb shanks (I temporarily put them in the slow cooker while I do the next bit). At this point I wrap the shanks in bacon and pin it in place with wooden toothpicks.

In the pan put in a little more oil then add in chopped celery and chopped carrots. As much as you think you want to eat.

Leave these to soften in the pan. In a mixing cup add 100mL of dry white wine. I find the cheapest Riesling I can find works great!

Add 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar.

Add a dash of Tabasco sauce. A BIG dash.

Add water to take the level to 120mL or so.

Mix this up well then add to the saucepan with the carrots and celery. Put a lid on the pan! Add any remaining mixture from the bag at this point. Before you put the lid on stupid.

Let this bubble for a bit then add 1 400mL tin of whole, peeled tomatoes.  I generally chop the tomatoes a bit with a knife while in the tin just to make the chunks smaller.

Add three anchovy fillets. Don’t ask me why but it won’t taste the same without them!

Let this mixture simmer for a few minutes.

Then I put the shanks back in the pan rotating them to get them well coated in the mixture.

Leave to simmer for a few more minutes.  Good time to do the dishes.

After the mixture has simmered for a while I put the shanks into the bottom of the slow cooker then carefully pour the rest of the mixture over the top of them.

Cook for 10 or so hours. Anywhere from 8 to 12 seems fine. 10 works well for me since I start them when I leave home for work and they are done when I get back!

Serve with mashed potatoes or, if you’re feeling lazy or your potatoes have all sprouted like mine, on top of rice.