rigid_to_crasftsman_vac_filter_converter

Personally and corporately I have used Craftsman shop vacs since 1984. I have also owned a few other brands, such as the Shop Vac brand, but the Craftsman was 3 to 4x's more powerful than the similarly rated Shop Vacs. I was extremely pleased with them.

I personally and corporately own about 3 Craftsman, and about 10 Ridgid shop vacs, and indeed, I own all the ones I've bought going back to 1984 except one. The one I don't own I accidentily plugged it into 220V power - I was AMAZED at the suction for a good 30 seconds, when I found out that it runs on smoke. You know: When you let the smoke out of an electric device, it stops running ....

When Sears (Craftsman) when out of business, I heard that the guys who designed the Craftsman vacs were hired by Ridgid and told "design them however you want, no restrictions." I don't know if it is true, but I do know the Ridgid vacs are as good or better than the Caftsman ones (and yes, I compared to a ShopVac a friend of mine recently bought, ShopVac just aren't in the same league).

But when it comes to buying filters, the Ridgid ones are slightly different (better) and they don't really work well on the Craftsman.

The Ridgid ones have a rubber gasket and they 'pop' onto the holder with no other parts. The Craftsman have a plate and a screw. THe screw is 'shorter' than the Ridgid plug, so if you force the Ridgid filter onto the Craftsman, it wrecks it much faster, shortening it's life to only about 1/3 of what it should be. Then, while I understand the benefits of che Rigid method to be that there are no parts to be lost, the benefit of the Craftsman is that you don't make as much mess removing a dirty filter to clean it. The 'popping' off of the filter inevitibly causes a little dust cloud. So I created two adapters: 1. An adapter that extends the screw of the Craftsman to accept the Ridgid 'pop on' filter, but then has a hex nut so that you can still unscrew it, rather than popping it off and 2. An adapter plate that takes a broken filter (the rubber seems to wear out before the filter material) and lets me continue to use the Ridgid filter on my Craftsman shop vacs - extending their life further. Some of the, I assume early, Ridgid shop vacs also had the screw that the Craftsman had, just a little longer. Perhaps they ran afoul of patent rules and had to change it, or perhaps they thought their new design was simply better. I don't know, but I can imagine creating a second 'plate' that is flatter that will allow the Ridgid. In my case I don't need to ... I simply moved the Craftsman plate that I can't use with the Ridgid filters to the Ridgid vacs! Then when the rubber plate starts to crack, I can put the Craftsman plate over top. For the adapter plate, I created 2 3mf files, one with more supports. If your printer is good at bridges and angles greater than 45 degrees, go with the one with just supports in the center (needed so my Prusa i3 MK3 can bridge to the center - otherwise there is nothing for the bridge to stick to, it'just barely' did the print using the center supports only. But barely is enough! Especially since this is going inside a vacume cleaner - I don't really care how pretty it looks, I just care that it works perfectly.

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