I only went as deep into this as necessary to answer the question, so it’s not going to be that detailed. Anyway, we will cover the disassembly and reassembly of the motor housing which will give you DIY-ers access to the on-off switch and motor of your Hyla Vacuum Cleaners:

Tools needed: Flat screwdriver or small pry tool and a small phillips screwdriver.

1. Pry up on the ends of the carrying handle cover using a flat screwdriver or something similar. This part is friction fit into the screw holes and seems to be made from tough material so dig in there, alternating ends to keep it coming up straight.

Removing Hyla Vacuum Handle Trim

Handle Trim Removed.

2. Remove the two screws holding the carrying handle to the body of the machine. Remove the handle.

3. Remove the top cover.

Handle and Top Cover Removed

4. Pull up gently on the motor housing. There are no screws holding this large piece of plastic. Mine popped right off. You should now see the switch and the top of the motor.

Motor Housing Removed

Re-Assembly Notes:

1. When positioning the motor housing, accommodate the switches first, then make sure the power cord strain relief is in it’s slot in the notch in the back of the motor housing.
2. Press down evenly around the housing and you should hear a satisfying snap indicating that the housing has seated properly.
3. Now re-install the top cover and the handle.
4. Finally press the handle trim piece back into place.

Strain Relief aligns with Slots in Motor Housing

So there you have it!  A much easier job really than the Hyla Vacuum Cleaners brush maintenance.  I’m not volunteering to disassemble the entire vacuum , but feel free to ask or comment if I can help!

Brett

A couple of weeks ago I was being a good hubby and was helping out with some household chores. We have a Hyla NST vacuum and Amy got it out of the closet to start cleaning the floors.

There are two main attachments for the Hyla NST. One is for hard/smooth floors and the other is for carpet. I noticed that she was running the smooth floor sweeper on our rug in the living room , so I asked why? “The [Electro-Brush] is throwing white dust when I use it, so I just use this one.” Wha? This is a thousand dollar machine and it’s not doing any good using the wrong attachment.

So I decided to investigate. The problem was that the Hyla Electro Brush was stopped up with various stuff, mainly some type of deodorant powder that she sprinkled on the carpet before vacuuming. This stuff had built up and started trapping more dirt and debris until the passage way was mostly blocked. It was also this stuff that was fogging out of the brush.

The only way to clean it out was to disassemble it. Of course i turned to Google first, but I found precious little about it. The user-guide on Hyla’s website was no help either, so I decided to take a couple of pictures and document the procedure for the benefit of someone else who may have the same problem.

Of course this information carries no warranty. This procedure was successful for me but your mileage may vary.

Tools needed: Phillips screwdriver and flat-head screwdriver or something similar for prying.

First, disconnect the Electro-Brush from the vacuum and any power source and flip it over. There are six screws to loosen and/or remove on the bottom.

Step 1 - Remove six screws.

Once those screws are out, flip it right side up and remove the top cover. This can be done with a flat screwdriver or other prying tool. Take your time as plastic parts can break pretty easily, but once you get it started it comes right off. The build quality of the Hyla is pretty good and the plastic is relatively tough.

With the top cover removed, you can see a white inner cover. Two screws hold this cover on. Remove those.

Step 2 - Remove screws holding inner cover.

Before removing the white inner cover, unwrap the white lamp wires from the slots in the cover. You want to push those wires down through the slot in the inner cover as you remove it. This will prevent the wires from being disconnected from the ballast underneath. Ask me how I figured this one out! You’ll want to eventually disconnect these wires, but you need to see where they go first.

Step 3 - Unwrap Lamp Wires

The handle catch lever also needs to be removed. This is the “trigger” that you push with your foot to release the handle from the upright position. It just snaps into place. The thing to watch out for here is the little spring underneath the lever. Make sure you don’t lose it.

Now you can remove the inner cover and the tubular handle.

It’s a good idea to mark the ballast wires where they connect to the circuit board and go ahead and unplug them to get the cover out of the way.

Step 4 - Inner cover removed.

Now you’re ready to give the air passage ways a good cleaning. I used the same flat screwdriver to scrape and chisel the build-up away. I also had quite a bit of string, hair, etc. wrapped around the ends of the rotating brush head, so I cleaned that off as well.

Step 5 - Clean Enough

Once you’re happy with the cleaning it’s time to re-assemble. Basically just reverse the order of the steps above. Remember to re-attach the tubular handle and the ballast wires before installing the inner cover. Pull the lamp wires back through the cover as you lower it down onto the base. After replacing the screws in the inner cover, re-wrap the lamp wires.

Install the handle release lever (don’t forget the spring!), then the outer cover. Flip the assembly back over and re-install the six screws from the bottom.

Congratulations! Your Hyla should suck as good as new. It was unbelievable how much dirt was in the water tank when I got through vacuuming the first time after doing the cleaning.

Prevention is better than cure, so from now on we’re not going to use any of the carpet powder, but eventually this will have to be done again. At least I’ll have this post to refer to.

If this information helped you, let me know in the comments.

Brett

The problem to be solved was basically a website that hadn’t had a design update since about 1998. It was still doing a pretty good job of presenting the inventory of used Jeeps to visitors and was ranked very good (#2 at Google at the time of this writing) for the main keyword, “used jeeps”.

Although the old design was very long in the tooth, it was just the tip of the iceberg shaped problem. The site was being maintained with Dreamweaver MX by the owner who really had no desire to be a webmaster. The site had been transferred to him some time ago and the previous webmaster had given the minimum of instructions on keeping it afloat. So what we really had was a workflow problem from one end to the other. Here’s a before screen-shot of the home page:

I was asked to get involved when the upstart new sales guy at Gilbert’s (my Uncle, Dennis ) talked Grant into purchasing a new PC. The only way they had of accessing the site was through the Dreamweaver MX interface and the install disks had been misplaced and of course the new PC didn’t come with Dreamweaver pre-installed. It turned out to be a blessing because I got to see the old workflow in action and it was painful to watch!

After seeing what had been going on for several years I proposed an extreme site makeover, webejeeping edition . I wanted to set up a system so that a relatively inexperienced PC user could be trained to maintain it. The system would start with importing photos of a newly acquired Jeep and end when that vehicle sold.

On the other side of the coin, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the site visitor to find information about all the vehicles in the current inventory including an attractive, more “sticky” design, larger more consistent images (that took up less disk space on the server too), and to lower the communication barrier by including contact forms at strategic places in the site. The old site had the email address displayed in text so that spam bots could find it easily. This new site needed to be much more spam resistant and the contact forms provided the needed protection.

Since I love to use WordPress as a Content Management System, I started looking around in my inventory of premium WordPress Themes from iThemes and decided that the iCar Theme would make an excellent starting point for the major framework of the site.

Here’s a shot of what I came up with:

To optimize the images, I had been using the Image Resizing Power Toy application from Microsoft, but it only worked with XP and since the new PC came with Vista it wouldn’t work. I found a replacement called VSO Image Resizer which is just as convenient and adds a couple of features that make it very handy. So now instead of 1mb+ images that take a long time to download the visitor gets 800 pixel wide images that are under 100k and still look great. Best of all it’s easy. The program adds a menu item to the right-click context menu so it’s super easy to launch.

I had recently watched a CSS-Tricks.com screencast about advanced uses for WordPress custom fields. It was very timely and I borrowed heavily from some of Chris’s techniques to put together custom templates for the Jeep-type index pages. I also created a custom template for the Jeep details page that utilized the full-width of the template.

Since I was making heavy use of WordPress custom fields, I needed a way to easily enter the data each time. For this I used the Custom Fields Template plugin. It worked very well. About half the vehicle data can be entered just by clicking on check boxes and radio buttons. This makes the data much more consistent and should make it easier for site visitors to compare the features of different vehicles. Other plugins that came in handy were Lightbox 2 for full-size image display and RSS Includes Pages which makes sure all pages get included in the RSS feed and not just posts which is default.

I got help from several other sites that I didn’t make note of (sorry!) as well as the WordPress Codex. I’m happy with the results so far! They have already had people coming to the lot after looking at the vehicles online and had good things to say about the ease of navigation and nice presentation of information. The volume of email coming in from the site has picked up quite a bit as well. The web forms really lower the barrier between the visitor and the business.

So go browse around on WeBeJeeping.com right now. If you’re working on a WordPress project and see a feature you have questions about feel free to email me with questions. Also I can now officially offer web hosting along with design services and I’d love to quote your website project.

Oh yeah, if you’re in the market for a Jeep, then find one you like, contact Grant or Dennis at Gilbert’s and make an offer!

Brett

Here are my personal priorities and considerations for picking domains:

1. Shortest .com that I can live with while avoiding dashes or special characters. If you’re lucky enough to find your preferred address ending in .com then stop reading this and register it! Now! Even for churches and organizations I recommend at least parking the .com even if you decide to use the .org version.

2. Will I be communicating the domain verbally? If so it needs to be memorable. Also consider the savvy-ness of the audience you’re communicating to. If your audience is relatively new to the web it’s even more important to stick with the familiar dot-com domain. If you run with a tech savvy crowd, then they are most like ready for anything you throw at them.

3. If people will be finding the site using primarily links online from your other profiles (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) then they’re just going to click on it mainly and the length and memorable factor is less important.

4. Will you print it on business cards? If it’s too long it might not fit well. Also three words are more difficult to remember than two. Keep it as short as possible.

5. If it’s a commercial site that you want to make money with then the decision is much more important than if it’s a personal / business card / blog type thing. If somebody wants to really wants to see your site (they know you or want to get to know you) they will spend the time to figure out what it is. If you’re trying to catch the general population of casual surfers you better make it as easy as possible because you only have a couple of seconds (literally) to hold their attention. Commercial sites need relevant, memorable names. Don’t get cute with it.

I know I promised five tips but here’s a bonus. Try NameBoy.com. You’ll know what it does when you get there so no further explanation is necessary. I’ve never registered a domain without running it by NameBoy.

So those are my top five considerations for choosing a domain name. I’ll give some registrar and hosting recommendations in a later post. Hint: Don’t default to Godaddy. There are other alternatives that don’t use questionable advertising practices.

Brett