Dyson × Moulton

Announced March 10, 1994, on the Dyson stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Earls Court, the DC01 AM began at a lunch at The Hall in Bradford-on-Avon in the autumn of 1993. Dyson had spent a year hearing that the DC01 was too heavy to carry upstairs. Moulton had spent thirty years arguing that stiffness comes from triangles, not bulk. The brief, written on one side of Moulton's headed notepaper, was to take a kilo out of the DC01 without making anything thinner.

The answer was to delete the moulded grey spine of the standard machine and build a triangulated spaceframe of 12.7 mm and 9.5 mm Reynolds 531 tube, brazed at Bradford-on-Avon by the framebuilders who made the AM series. The cyclone and motor pod hang inside the lattice on four bonded rubber mounts of the kind Moulton had been specifying since the Mini, which made the machine audibly quieter than the donor DC01, if not by much. The rear wheels are small, hard and sprung on rubber cones, so the cleaner rolls over Victorian brass door strips without a thump. At waist height a stainless kingpin from the AM parts bin lets the upper frame and handle come away from the base with a quarter turn of a yellow lever.

Which? found that it cleaned exactly as well as a DC01 at less than half the price, and weighed exactly 1.1 kg less. Cycling Weekly gave it more space than Ideal Home did. Members of the Moulton Bicycle Club bought a noticeable share of the first run, several of whom reported using it to clean their bicycles.

Each frame is stamped under the handle crossbar with a serial number, starting at 94-0001. That machine stayed at The Hall, where it cleaned the gunroom until 2012 and was never once separated at the kingpin.