Hair Clipper Vacuum Attachment

[Darren Wright]

I stopped in a while back a the local barbershop to have my ears lowered. While there I noticed the owner fussing with the vacuum hose attachment on his hair clippers. He mentioned it was breaking and he said he couldn't hardly find the attachments anymore. I offered to try and make him a 3d printed version, and he was interested. I stopped in this week to see if he found an old one I could use to model one off of. He hadn't been able to find one, but his son mentioned they had a bunch of the old clippers in the parts grave yard and asked if I could use one of them to model from, which I thought I'd be able to. He grabbed one for me and I took a few pics of one of the attachments.


These are on an Oster 76, like this one.


I spent a couple hours tonight modeling a new one. I was able to use the pics I took and scale them to size to measure and get close on the design.


Here is the v1 model.


And the first test fit.


He also had an old version that is the length of the clippers. He didn’t care for the original, his hands are smaller and it was difficult to grip for too long. I’m thinking I can reduce the thickness of it a bit and make it more comfortable.

 

[Mike Stafford]

My first thought when I read the title of this thread was that you had bought a Flowbee.. I don't know how many of you remember the Flowbee but it was an attachment for your vacuum cleaner that you used to cut your hair.

The Flowbee is attached to the vacuum hose. The Flowbee is an electrically powered set of rotating cutter blades. You connect the Flowbee hose to a standard vacuum cleaner. When you turn the vacuum on, the suction pulls your hair straight up and outward into the cutting head. there are a series of different spacers that limit how much of your hair is exposed to the blades.

My grandfather had one and his hair cuts were atrocious. The Flowbee does not do a very good job of tapering around the ears so his head looked like he had a short napped rug with a fringe around the edge. Bless his heart.

 

[Darren Wright]

Yeah, those were actually quite popular during Covid and made a reappearance.

They use these on the professional clippers and have no need for the capes and sweeping the floors, for the most part.

Of course you have no idea what is being said during half of your hair cut as the suction noise near your ears is drowning out most of that conversation.

 

[Brent Dowell]

Ahh, The old 'Suck Cut'! Nice job!

 

[Darren Wright]

The beta print of the full length version. The hose on this one connects the butt end, where the power cord is. The automatic tree supports were interesting. One made its way in through a vent hole and up the center. It was a bit of a pain to cut out, but did its job.

I have a few tweaks to make to the butt end, but fit well overall.

 

[Darren Wright]

The fixed version of the full length adapter. I found the vents didn’t quite line up, so went with a multi-hole approach for now. I’m not sure this one wasn’t taken apart and put on reversed of the original location, so will compare to the other clippers at the shop when I drop them off.


I'll print another today and drop them off tomorrow sometime to let them do some testing. I may need to thicken the walls on the full length one. If they are working ok, I'll print them some petg or asa.

 

[Darren Wright]

I drew up a hose/cord clip similar to some I have on my orbital sander, but for the smaller hose the shop uses, which they gave me a sample of. I printed a dozen for them to test out.