Coming on the heals of another time wasting slog in search of an extractor/vac hose fitting, it occurred to me that we should start and maintain a thread dedicated to assisting people in finding correctly mating hose fittings.
For those of us who are not wedded to any particular brand when it comes to hoses and/or fittings (or, for that matter, tools or, cyclones or vacuums), sourcing replacement fittings and/or hoses is a nightmare. Most brands work off the concept of "proprietary'ism", whereby they want to keep the waters muddy in regards to what accessories/consumables/spare parts will work with their products, all so their customers are stuck buying their (and only their) wares.
In the case of vac fittings, few brands (if any) properly list or provided the I.D. and O.D. of the fittings they sell, an infuriating dilemma which makes it nearly impossible to know if a given fitting will work with a specific tool/hose/fitting/cyclone/extractor combination. Since often the fittings in question all emanate from the same single factory (for instance, I'm more and more convinced that Nilfisk has the majority of the private label market), it's insulting to folks like me who want to find the correct and usually cheapest version of basically the same thing. IOW why pay a Festool-price for a component made by a third party who also makes that same or similar part for other companies (including sometimes their own in-house brand), many of which end up selling for pennies on the dollar in comparison to the Rolls Royce pricing of the top end brand(s)?
In my case, my "big" vac is a CS-Unitec-branded i-Pulse (manufactured in Germany by Starmix) machine and my hoses are a mix of Bosch and Festool-branded hoses (likely all manufactured by Nilfisk).
Most recently, because I've inserted a cheap but nonetheless excellently performing Dustopper dust cyclone in between my hand held machines and my extractor, I no longer have the use of the locking bayonet "cuff" fitting which came installed (on the vac-end) on most of my hoses. Instead, because the locking bayonet fitting isn't compatible with the inlet port on the Dustopper cyclone (which features the worldwide standard tapered ~58.5mm ID inlet -female - port designed for male 57mm or 1-1/4 friction fittings) I need to switch from bayonet to friction-fit.
I ended up with a Festool-branded friction cuff fitting following the huge sell off of all the ribbed hose accessories that accompanied Festool's switch to the smooth hose design (I paid 50% of the original price for that name brand fitting) which I've been swapping between my hoses as the need arises. That gets old real quick. But, since I'm not willing to pay in excess of US$30 for a piece of plastic (the going price for the Festool-version of the cuff I'm after) I did a little sleuthing.
After the usual reading between the lines, querying like minded employees at large brands, scouring the internet, etc., I was ultimately able to deduce (and this deduction has since been affirmed) that Nilfisk part # 15102, as shown below:
[attachimg=1]
[Source]
...is the part I'm looking for.
This hose cuff is compatible with 35mm (as well as so-called "36mm") ribbed hoses (and it features the improved design whereby you simply reverse thread the fitting onto the hose instead of needing the take the fitting apart into what is normally three component pieces and then snapping the assembly back together again) and is designed to friction fit inside the male inlet port on standard shop vac/dust extractors.
FYI all of Festool's vacs, as well as most other brands of "industrial" vacs (so, Ridgid, Bosch, Metabo, CS Unitec, Fein, Milwaukee, etc.) feature this same inlet port size.
The Festool version of the cuff (the one I was absolutely not willing to pay an obscene amount for) is #204920 (and costs between US$32 and US$35). Meanwhile, the Nilfsik-branded version is less than US$9 (not including shipping). It's unclear if the Nilfisk model is antistatic, but given that I don't live in the desert I've never had a problem with static build-up.
As an aside, please don't believe the product description that sometimes accompanies Nilfisk # 15102 - you'll often see "36mm to 50mm". This refers, mostly unhelpfully, to the I.D.'s of the hose (the I.D. of 36 mm hose is 36mm) it's designed to work with and the ID of the other end (a completely worthless piece of information). Again, this is intentional in order to muddy the waters. If this part was listed everywhere properly (as shown on the image above borrowed from the website of a random Slovenian retailer who went out of its way to use a non-stock photo that displays the basic info we as consumers need to be able to make informed decisions) people would know that they could buy this part instead of the Festool-branded one and save a bundle while doing so. Infuriating but a part of life in a capitalist society.
The moral of the story is that I spent the same as Festool's price for one fitting for instead three fittings, even when shipping is included.
So, I encourage others to add their own experiences when it comes to mixing and matching brands so that we might finally break through the deliberate obfuscation that surrounds vacuum hoses and fittings.
Have at it!
For those of us who are not wedded to any particular brand when it comes to hoses and/or fittings (or, for that matter, tools or, cyclones or vacuums), sourcing replacement fittings and/or hoses is a nightmare. Most brands work off the concept of "proprietary'ism", whereby they want to keep the waters muddy in regards to what accessories/consumables/spare parts will work with their products, all so their customers are stuck buying their (and only their) wares.
In the case of vac fittings, few brands (if any) properly list or provided the I.D. and O.D. of the fittings they sell, an infuriating dilemma which makes it nearly impossible to know if a given fitting will work with a specific tool/hose/fitting/cyclone/extractor combination. Since often the fittings in question all emanate from the same single factory (for instance, I'm more and more convinced that Nilfisk has the majority of the private label market), it's insulting to folks like me who want to find the correct and usually cheapest version of basically the same thing. IOW why pay a Festool-price for a component made by a third party who also makes that same or similar part for other companies (including sometimes their own in-house brand), many of which end up selling for pennies on the dollar in comparison to the Rolls Royce pricing of the top end brand(s)?
In my case, my "big" vac is a CS-Unitec-branded i-Pulse (manufactured in Germany by Starmix) machine and my hoses are a mix of Bosch and Festool-branded hoses (likely all manufactured by Nilfisk).
Most recently, because I've inserted a cheap but nonetheless excellently performing Dustopper dust cyclone in between my hand held machines and my extractor, I no longer have the use of the locking bayonet "cuff" fitting which came installed (on the vac-end) on most of my hoses. Instead, because the locking bayonet fitting isn't compatible with the inlet port on the Dustopper cyclone (which features the worldwide standard tapered ~58.5mm ID inlet -female - port designed for male 57mm or 1-1/4 friction fittings) I need to switch from bayonet to friction-fit.
I ended up with a Festool-branded friction cuff fitting following the huge sell off of all the ribbed hose accessories that accompanied Festool's switch to the smooth hose design (I paid 50% of the original price for that name brand fitting) which I've been swapping between my hoses as the need arises. That gets old real quick. But, since I'm not willing to pay in excess of US$30 for a piece of plastic (the going price for the Festool-version of the cuff I'm after) I did a little sleuthing.
After the usual reading between the lines, querying like minded employees at large brands, scouring the internet, etc., I was ultimately able to deduce (and this deduction has since been affirmed) that Nilfisk part # 15102, as shown below:
[attachimg=1]
[Source]
...is the part I'm looking for.
This hose cuff is compatible with 35mm (as well as so-called "36mm") ribbed hoses (and it features the improved design whereby you simply reverse thread the fitting onto the hose instead of needing the take the fitting apart into what is normally three component pieces and then snapping the assembly back together again) and is designed to friction fit inside the male inlet port on standard shop vac/dust extractors.
FYI all of Festool's vacs, as well as most other brands of "industrial" vacs (so, Ridgid, Bosch, Metabo, CS Unitec, Fein, Milwaukee, etc.) feature this same inlet port size.
The Festool version of the cuff (the one I was absolutely not willing to pay an obscene amount for) is #204920 (and costs between US$32 and US$35). Meanwhile, the Nilfsik-branded version is less than US$9 (not including shipping). It's unclear if the Nilfisk model is antistatic, but given that I don't live in the desert I've never had a problem with static build-up.
As an aside, please don't believe the product description that sometimes accompanies Nilfisk # 15102 - you'll often see "36mm to 50mm". This refers, mostly unhelpfully, to the I.D.'s of the hose (the I.D. of 36 mm hose is 36mm) it's designed to work with and the ID of the other end (a completely worthless piece of information). Again, this is intentional in order to muddy the waters. If this part was listed everywhere properly (as shown on the image above borrowed from the website of a random Slovenian retailer who went out of its way to use a non-stock photo that displays the basic info we as consumers need to be able to make informed decisions) people would know that they could buy this part instead of the Festool-branded one and save a bundle while doing so. Infuriating but a part of life in a capitalist society.
The moral of the story is that I spent the same as Festool's price for one fitting for instead three fittings, even when shipping is included.
So, I encourage others to add their own experiences when it comes to mixing and matching brands so that we might finally break through the deliberate obfuscation that surrounds vacuum hoses and fittings.
Have at it!
