LOST Miles Ghost Machine

[Shovelbuddy]

I know it has been a while since LOST has come and gone, but as I am on my third watch of the series, my obsession is still ongoing.

While watching Season 4 Episode 2 "Confirmed Dead" I came again to Miles Straume's first flashback where he uses a strange vacuum looking machine to aid him in talking to (and extorting) the dead.

I decided to make this my newest project.

 

[Shovelbuddy]

And then I started the research. Based solely on as many screeshots of the 3 min scene as I could pull from my DVD and not much else I began my search. At first I thought it looked like a regular handheld vacuum, but I had little luck there. Luckily upon asking a friend of mine what they thought it looked like, I found that "carpet scrubber" was closer to the mark.

That's when I found this:

The Dirt Devil Spot Scrubber

I was ecstatic. So I procured one from eBay and got it in yesterday and took it apart. Already I can see I have a little more work ahead of my than I originally thought. In the show, the disk with the lines (the scrubber) turns and makes a whirring sound. I want this prop to function when I plug it in. I had thought that the brush was run by its own motor, but it turns out that the brush is run by the vacuum... :confused

I know that they removed the vacuum motor because I have a scree shot where you can see clear through the housing where the motor would be. That means that they had to have something else driving the brush, I'll deal with that later.

 

[Shovelbuddy]

Well, I'm off to a good start, but as this is a WIP I have a lot still to figure out. Two thing that currently have me stumped are circled in the pic below:

I have no idea what those silvery cylinders are. On the actual scrubber that area has a lever that activates the spray nozzle in the front. The middle tube is from that, the other two were added. As far as I can tell, the silvery bits aren't part of the original dirt devil, and they look metallic and not just painted.

The other thing is the second thing I have circled, there are no good shots as to what that is, it looks like some kind of dial or something. All I know is that its not on the dirt devil. I think that it might be some kind of mechanism they added to control the motor they must have installed to turn the disk. Maybe a dial or a potentiometer...

Anyone have any ideas?