The pistol grip dustbuster

Do you feel lucky, junk?

What to do with a dustbuster with leaky batteries and a cordless drill with a burned out motor? Well, the sensible thing would be to throw both of them in the junk bin I suppose. But if you're a cheapskate like me, you'd frankenstein them into this... thing.

Joking aside, I needed a vacuum for my worktable and I might as well use the parts I already had laying around as going out to buy a new one.

The Li-Ion battery pack of the cordless drill supplies juice to the vacuum motor resulting in a fully functional, albeit somewhat ergonomically challenging, dustbuster. Waste not, want not.

I didn't have the foresight to take any photos of the build process, but it mostly consisted of soldering two wires together.

The back end of the cordless drill disassembles into two mirrored parts. I removed most of the the dustbusters original handle with pliers. The remaining stump turned out to be of the exact right shape to lock into the drill back end after reassembly.

I glued the direction toggle to clockwise mode as to not risk running the vacuum motor in reverse by accident.

The drill battery pack outputs a higher voltage than the original NiMH batteries, so in addition to improved aesthetics it now busts dust better than ever. And it can hot-swap battery packs.

Of course the auto-break function of the original drill now translates into instantaneous vacuuming  cessation at trigger release, allowing for a very high level of precision on which exact dust particles to pick up. 

I'm oddly pleased with the result of this build. The two parts turned out to be suprisingly compatible from a design standpoint. Even the color scheme with details of red and silver matches quite well.

If Flash Gordon had had a personal dustbuster, I'd imagine it'd be this one.