I really don’t remember what prompted me to buy this little vacuum. It was pretty inexpensive. Maybe I had a store credit I needed to use before it expired? Maybe I was thinking I would use it for dust recovery on my orbital sander? It had been sitting in its box for years.
Who knows, but it was small and powerful enough, to use on my mini CNC machine so I dusted it off and got to work.
It was $30 at Home Depot and came with a few essential accessories:
The Stinger 2.5 Gal. wet/dry vac is a compact and portable vac for wet and dry applications. Expect the suction to be just what you need for your home, garage and renovation cleanups. Included vacuum attachments allow you take on a wide variety of surfaces and applications that would be harder to clean with the hose alone. Uses replacement vacuum filter bag VF2000.
- 1.75 peak HP, 4.0 Amp motor for any home, garage or renovation mess
- Easily converts into a blower to help clear work areas of debris
- Included bag filter traps dust and debris
- Dent-resistant plastic tank provides durability for care-free maneuverability
- 10 ft. power cord provides an extensive reach
- 4 ft. hose with car nozzle and utility nozzle help you tackle a variety of cleaning jobs
- Peak horsepower represents a level at or below the maximum horsepower output of an electric motor tested in a laboratory using a dynamometer
- Gallons indicated reflect drum volume, not necessarily collection capacity, actual capacity dependent upon type of debris collected, condition of filter and other factors
The biggest issue I had with this thing was that it was loud. Really loud.
I have pretty severe Tinnitus. It was caused by standing next to roaring chain saws from approximately the age of 5 to 14. Followed by decades of working in restaurant kitchens.
If you go here and play Tinnitus sounds 3 and 6 simultaneously at about 42dB you will hear what I do, non-stop, 24-7. Sometimes it’s seems louder, on rare events I’ll hardly notice it.
The worst part about it is that the quieter the environment around me is, the louder it sounds in my head. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I cannot go to sleep without something to drown out the noise in my ears. Unfortunately and as much as I’d like to, for various reasons I cannot use music. So for the last few decades I use a TV. Fortunately most TV’s now have a sleep timer so it doesn’t have to run all night. I can set it to shut off after 90 minutes or so.
Anyway, getting back to the vacuum. I needed the machine to serve as dust collection and a blower to keep the bits cool on my CNC machine. For efficiency’s sake it had to be fairly close to the CNC machine. Which meant it would be close to me when operating the CNC. The CNC was already loud enough the combination of the two was beyond deafening.
The Stinger Vac alone is 93-95dB, pretty loud for such a small vacuum.
I really don’t need to damage my hearing any more than I already have so I decided to build some sound reduction for it.
My first attempt was less than stellar, dropping the noise level only a little over 10 dB.
The add on baffle I built for it made it much more bearable with an over-all drop of 30dB.
