How to Fix Squashed Hose?

jonny round boy

jonny round boy

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Joined
Jul 21, 2007
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I've just bought a 2nd hand vac, and the 27mm hose is quite badly squashed as if it's been coiled with something heavy on top of it.

In places it's flattened to under 20mm thick, which I'm sure must affect the airflow. I was thinking that it might be possible to restore the hose by gently heating it & squeezing it the other way whilst it cools.

Has anyone else tried this? Does anyone have any ideas how I might best achieve heating it without melting it? Or another solution entirely?
 
jonny round boy said:
I've just bought a 2nd hand vac, and the 27mm hose is quite badly squashed as if it's been coiled with something heavy on top of it.

In places it's flattened to under 20mm thick, which I'm sure must affect the airflow. I was thinking that it might be possible to restore the hose by gently heating it & squeezing it the other way whilst it cools.

Has anyone else tried this? Does anyone have any ideas how I might best achieve heating it without melting it? Or another solution entirely?
Click to expand...

had a similar problem with a vac hose and fixed it by putting it in a jar with hot water while gently pressing the ends together to re-establish the tension.. after this, i used a second jar with ice water to keep the tension.. actually this worked great..
hth

kind regards, Mike
 
Thanks Mike,

That seems a bit safer than trying to heat it with a heat-gun, which was my initial idea. I'd probably melt through it...

I'll try with hot water first & see how it goes!
 
jonny round boy said:
In places it's flattened to under 20mm thick, which I'm sure must affect the airflow.
Click to expand...

I don't see why this would be (too) true.  If it's flattened out, it's oval shaped, right?  The volumetric capacity of the oval is the same as of the circle.
There might be some complicated rules about the shape of an airflow pathway, but in terms of constriction it shouldn't seem to matter for aifrlow.

However, if you suck up a piece of debris of "x" size, it might get caught up by the oval, wherease it would pass through the circle just fine.  So, do you vacuum debris, or mostly dust/chips?
 
Wood_Junkie said:
I don't see why this would be (too) true.  If it's flattened out, it's oval shaped, right?  The volumetric capacity of the oval is the same as of the circle.
Click to expand...

Nice idea, but for reasons that are far too complicated to get into here, that's simply not true I'm afraid. The area of an elipse of given circumference will always be less than a circle of the same circumference.
 
Haha, someone start the countdown until the big guns arrive... [popcorn]
 
It's easily visualised. Try to flatten the oval to a width of 1mm..... and imagine the resulting area.
The maximum area for a given circumference is a always achieved in a circle. It's a physical thing...  [huh]

Regards,

Job (extremely tiny pea-gun thingie....)
 
Jonny i had the same thing with my midi vac and posted on here about it. I used a small heater if i remember rightly to warm it up then slid a tube or broom handle inside and just took my time and teased it back to shape the let it cool. You need to concentrate on each concertina part of the hose and carefully get it back to shape

did you buy it from chems hes just sold a ct22 on the ukworkshop forum
 
joiner1970 said:
Jonny i had the same thing with my midi vac and posted on here about it. I used a small heater if i remember rightly to warm it up then slid a tube or broom handle inside and just took my time and teased it back to shape the let it cool. You need to concentrate on each concertina part of the hose and carefully get it back to shape

did you buy it from chems hes just sold a ct22 on the ukworkshop forum
Click to expand...

No, it's a CTL26, not a 22. Bought it on eBay - quite a bargain really - only 4 months old (list price £454 new), and with the long-life bag (list price £128) - both for £310.
 
Now that we're talking about repairing hoses, anybody know how to fix small holes in the hose? I had a couple of accidents with the DS400 and the Rotex. Just small holes really, was thinking of pouring some glue in to fix them but I have no clue which glue to use exactly. Mainly because I don't know what plastic the hose are made of.

They have these computers over at the big box stores here from the popular brand Bison which are supposed to help you choose the right glue for the right application but when you hit the 'plastics' part of the menu you get dozens of different names like PE, PTFE, ABS or whatever in front of your nose to choose from and I have no clue which type of plastic the Festool hoses are. I'm afraid to buy the wrong glue because if you get the wrong type you might actually burn an even bigger hole in the hose.

Anybody have any ideas?
 
Alex,

I don't think a glue would be very successful, since it would need to be very flexible (as flexible as the hose). How small are you talking? Half a mm? 1mm? 5mm?

If it's less than around 2mm, then a blob/smear of silicone may do it. Might not if it is larger though. Since it's a vacuum hose, the pressure outside will be greater than inside - that will help to hold any repair on.

If the hole is quite large, you could try adhesive lined heat shrink tubing. If it's near one end (
 
So far none of my many Festool hoses has been smashed nor developed holes. I count my lucky stars!

I agree that with vac hoses the treatment for minor holes is a decent dab of silicone caulking. The advantage to vac hose is the pressure is toward the inside, so the vac action tends to make the repair work better. The last non-Festool vac hose I owned that had a hole I fixed with a kind of silicone caulk that was made to be used in a hot melt gun. Right now I cannot find that package, sorry to say. I bought it a few years ago at HD or Lowe's

As for fixing the smashed hose, the approach that worked well for me in the past was to break out one of the tubs I use when bending wood. I heated the water as usual and let the smashed portion soak. While it was still hot and soft I started running positive air pressure through the hose, using the exhaust port of a shop vac. Then I plugged the free end of the hose. Because the smashed portion restricted the air flow, pressure built until the hose popped back to its original round state. As that happened I released the plug.

With the air still moving I removed the hose from the hot water and plunged it into another tub with room temperature water. That particular hose has worked well ever since, about 6 years.

An experienced scenic set building supervisor had told me about this trick 20 years ago, but I only needed to use it on that one hose in 2004.
 
jonny round boy said:
Alex,

I don't think a glue would be very successful, since it would need to be very flexible (as flexible as the hose). How small are you talking? Half a mm? 1mm? 5mm?
Click to expand...

jonny, they're very small, like one mm. The sanders touched the hose slightly, puncturing the most outer part of 3 or 4 of the ribs. I'd post a picture but my vac is at a job site right now. The repair doesn't need to be flexible because a single rib doesn't really flex that much. I'll try some silicone as you suggested and see what it does, but I'm not sure it will stick for a longer time. Have tried silicone in the past for gluing other stuff but never with much success.

Funny thing is, I bought my mini used and it had some stuff sticking on the hose and it sticks really well. But I don't know what it is.  [unsure]
 
Alex said:
Funny thing is, I bought my mini used and it had some stuff sticking on the hose and it sticks really well. But I don't know what it is.  [unsure]
Click to expand...

Just had a little chuckle at that! It's always the way, isn't it?

How about good old duct tape? Or self amalgamating tape?
 
I would think just about any tape that remains flexible would work. The negative pressure is trying to pull it through the hole and if the hole is small enough...

Tom
 
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