Looking for a Replacement Motor - Fein Vac 9.55.13

[Curt Harms]

In case you're still following this thread:
I've owned four Fein Turbo vacs to date and in the past just thrown them away to buy a new one. But not any more I have vowed.

My latest Fein Turbo just died too. The sticker on the side of my Fein vac motor read" Ametek 1336". I contacted the maker of their vac motors, Ametek-Lamb and was told by their sales engineer that the motor was made by their Italian factory. He was unsuccessful attempting to provide me with a source so I searched through all of their vacuum motors listed on their web site and selected Ametek Model 116448-00 as the closest match in performance and dimensions to the motor in the Fein vac. Bought one on Ebay and installed in yesterday. Works great and I'm back in business. This whole ordeal took me a month to work through all the leads for parts, parts vendors and the Ametek factory.

From my experience with the Fein vacuum the motor has a service life of no more than 500 hours. Depending on the severity of service, either the brushes wear out or the bearings seize up. I've used mine a lot for sheet rock dust sanding and saw dust removal from shop tools. Usually it's the bearings that let go for me and, in my latest case, I removed the brushes and they still had a lot of life left.

Hope this helps out and is not too late for you to utilize.

Thanks for the Ametek model info. I think bearings fail in vac motors because the motors run in the filtered air stream. If the air stream still has small particles in it, those small particles will end up in the motor and bearings. I have a clean stream HEPA cartridge filter on my vac in addition to a bag. I'm hoping that combination minimizes the tiny particles in the airflow around the motor.

[Frank Drackman]

You are a better man than me. I finally gave up looking and purchased a new Fein. It is fine. But I liked the old one better.

[Randall J Cox]

I'm on my 2nd Fein Turbo II, first one lasted 15 years. Liked it so much, bought a new one on sale about 4 years ago. All the others seems to be so loud... Randy At that time, the hose and cord were both just like the original, sounds like they both got worse (shorter and less flexible).

[Bruce Wrenn]

All Fien Vacuum owners need to book mark this thread for future reference. Ametek used to make the motors used in the PorterCable 6 gal pancake compressors.

[Hector Gonzalez]

I wanted to confirm that the Ametek 116448-00 is a drop-in replacement for the original motor in the Fein 9.55.13 vacuum. It seems to bit a bit louder than the original, but also seems to pull a stronger vacuum, which is a good trade-off for me. Thank you John Kather!

I did want to relay my experience with this though. When my Fein died, I wanted to see if I could fix it, both because I had a stockpile of bags and filters, and because everywhere I looked, people said that the replacement Fein, the Turbo II, didn't work as well as the original. But when I replace the motor with the Ametek, nothing, it was dead. I realized that it was not the motor that was the problem, and figured out that the power cord stopped working. I bring this up because I had a Miele house vac that stopped running, and when I brought it to two different repair shops, they said that it was the power cord. When I questioned them on it, they said that the motors in Miele's were great and that they would outlast the rest of the vacuum, that it almost certainly the power cord. I didn't really believe them, but sure enough, when I checked, it was indeed the power cord that had gone out in my Miele.

If your vacuum stops working, check the power cord. You might save yourself a whole lot of time and money. I think the problem is that the wire in power cords are stranded, and when they are wound and unwound over and over again, a strand breaks, here and there, and over time enough of them break for there to be a problem. Plus, there's all of the times that you step on it, bend it at a sharp angle, etc.

I hope this helps somebody out. I'm glad I replaced the motor in my Fein, but I probably wouldn't have done so if I knew it was just the power cord.