A small reclamation

[Joel_BC]

One day I went to the closest recycling place, nearby but much smaller than our “transfer station” (regional-district dump for our section of our valley and the village contained in it). The place I went is just a parking area with five bins. Though they’re not supposed to, some people leave miscellaneous junk on the ground—children’s clothes and toys, old VHS videos, empty beer & pop cans, that sort of stuff. I found that someone had left this 11-gallon compressor tank with the compressor itself removed.

I looked it over, it seemed to have no cracks or rust where air might leak and it had good wheels & handle, so I took an interest… even though it was just a tank with a check-valve. I brought it home. I figured if I could get air into it, and out of it when I needed to, that I could use it as a portable to run my tacker from. The tacker drives staples or smallish nails, so I use it for things like shingling or tacking-on asphalt sheet roofing. I have a compressor, but it’s too heavy & bulky to take to sites, and is now permanently set up in my shop area.

I bought a few brass fittings intended to let air in from my shop compressor and allow me the outflow option to hook up pneumatic lines to my tacker or other tools.

You can see one fitting in-place on top of the tank, above the wheel area. I tried to braze an adapter onto a coupler so I could use the tank’s check-valve to input the compressed air. The other picture shows the dismal result: using the smallest oxy-acetylene torch tip I own, I still managed to melt the adaptor before I could fuse the two parts together with brass filler rod. Oops!

My next move will be to have a neighbour of mine—who does brass (musical) instrument repair—teach me how to do lower temperature silver soldering to join an adaptor to the coupler. Repairing trumpets, saxophones, and flutes is delicate work. I suspect he may use a small butane torch for that sort of thing, but we’ll see.

Wish me luck.

 

[tortoise]

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Luck! It will be cool if you can re-hab it and get some use from it!

 

[sumi]

Wow, that can work, if you can get it done! Keep us posted.

 

[Britesea]

And maybe you will be learning another skill on top of acquiring a useful tool

 

[Joel_BC]

And maybe you will be learning another skill on top of acquiring a useful tool

That's it.

 

[milkmansdaughter]

Any chance you can look up Coleman and see if they have a replacement part? The thing doesn't look that old. I would have picked it up too, just to see if we could use it for "something" I hope you can get it working. I can see a tacker coming in really handy!

 

[Joel_BC]

Any chance you can look up Coleman and see if they have a replacement part? The thing doesn't look that old. I would have picked it up too, just to see if we could use it for "something" I hope you can get it working. I can see a tacker coming in really handy!

Coleman may just be the brand the compressor was sold under. My guess is that Coleman (or whoever actually manufactured the machine) might have replacement parts such as the electric motor and the piston-based compressor. But I'm not planning on using those, and my task is to adapt the tank to take and hold air from the big compressor in my shop.

I suspect that the original Coleman compressor set-up (tank included) would've had a new cost well over $200. Sometimes to replace things like the motor and compressor might cost more than that much, by time their delivered. But if my plan works out the tank, functional for my purposes, will have cost me only the $30 or so that I put into the fittings.

 

[Joel_BC]

Here’s my freebie air tank, all outfitted for doing tasks. My neighbor/friend helped me get the small parts brazed together. This actually occurred a while ago, but I've been too busy to take pictures until today. Being a brass musical instrument repairman, my friend uses small torches much like what a jeweller uses. So he started the brazing task and then got me handling the torch. Which has made me no expert with the small torch, but it’s a start for me.

Anyhow, I put the setup together. I think you can see, in the picture, a black pneumatic hose coming down and connecting into the fitting on the top of the red tank on the left (handle end). That hose comes from my compressor (which is the unit involving the larger blue tank). Once the air is up to proper pressure & volume, the input hose can be disconnected and the little red tank can be wheeled wherever work is happening. The outlet hose will get connected to the other brass fitting that's toward the right end of the tank in the picture. The pressure in the little portable tank will always equalize to the outflow pressure to which the regulator on the blue tank is set.

I'm pretty happy, and I look forward to using it on homestead tasks.

 

[milkmansdaughter]

Very nice, Joel! In this life, it's not always how much you know, as WHO you know.
I bet that is handy in many ways. I can imagine how nice it will be to a) not need to be plugged in, and b) to have a unit so small and portable.
Do you have an outlet hose? This won't need any kind of compressor?
I remember you talked about using it as a tacker. Can it also be used for something like pumping up a tire? I hope you'll let us know how well it works.