Supercharged Dustbuster
February 26, 2025
Supercharged Dustbuster
This was just a quick project to fix an old Dust Buster. The batteries would no longer take a charge and these days with everything being disposable you can not buy replacement batteries so I had to improvise.
The stock Dust Buster used a 2 cell 7.2V battery and maybe if I looked hard enough I could have found replacement cells and soldered them in but the whole unit was only about $20 back in the day so buying a whole new Dust Buster would probably be (pick one) smarter/easier/cheaper.
I do though have a few 20V Dewalt batteries on hand so I thought I’d try one on the Dust Buster. I already had a spare Dewalt battery adapter laying around from a converted leaf blower project and the DC to DC converter was from some other project that’s probably still on “The List”.
I forgot to take a picture of the old battery but this is the internals of the Dust Buster with the battery, exhaust grate and bottom charging plate removed.
I did some hacking with a Dremel to open up the battery area to fit the converter. I did briefly test out the motor straight off the 20v battery but lets just say sparks were flying…. right out of the motor.
A quick test fit of the regulator.
To mount the battery adapter I started by drawing a straight line along the bottom to flatten things out.
I little more work with the Dremel and a belt sander and it should be good enough.
It’s flat now but not much left to mount to.
I jumped into CAD and then 3D printed these mounting plates for the bottom. I split the design so I can still take the Dust Buster apart in the future.
They are super glued in place but I did use one tiny screw to hold them in place while the super glue dried.
There wasn’t much meat for the screw but it held enough.
After both halves were glued in place I installed some 4-40 heat set inserts with a soldering iron.
Hopefully this is enough of a exhaust port in the front… I actually want to make a deflector to direct the air flow toward the rear of the Dust Buster so it doesn’t blow around what ever I’m trying to suck up. (I’ll see if everything works before going to the trouble though.)
Next it was just a matter of wiring up the battery adapter to the DC-DC Converter and reassembling the Dust Buster.
The wires just come out of the back… there was already a hole for a different charging plug that some of these vacuums had.
After that the battery adapter is mounted to the new base plate… I probably could have done the wiring a little cleaner as I really don’t need the 30amp inline fuse but I might want to reuse this adapter in the future if this ends up letting the magic smoke out of the motor.
The top attachment point was also broken on this Dust Buster so…
…a quick 3D print fixed that too.
Here is the completed project ready to get back to work. At 12 volts now it’s supercharged with about a 68% more power which should equal more suck.
Initial testing seems to be working great so I also went ahead and designed and printed some crevice tool attachments for it.
These make cleaning up all the filament bits around my printers a lot easier. Now we’ll just have to see how long the super charged motor lasts.
This is the design for the exhaust diverter. To just conforms to the split bottom plate I made before. If I thought of it before these could have been all one piece (or two with the split).
I did just glue it to one have of the base plate though so it can still come apart.
It works great and now there’s no change of the exhaust air flow blowing around the dust I’m trying to suck up.
Beware – If you do try to replicate this project or do something similar you have to make sure to TURN OFF the switch on the adapter or unplug the battery after each use or the DC to DC converter with drain your battery beyond it’s lower limit and it will not recharge. You will have to use another battery to jump start the dead one in order for it to recharge again.
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