Air Compressor Upgrade
Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2020 7:50 pm
While doing a lot of sandblasting on the Triumph my air compressor did a good job of keeping up but it paid the price of passing lots of oil laden water thru my water traps and into my air hoses with all the humidity. This caused a problem when I went to paint the frame with fish eyes and caused a lot of extra work to get the paint to do what I wanted it to.
While cruising the old interweb I found a video of a pre-cooler to lower the heated compressed air going into the tank.
I've taken a few photos of the project...I don't have a picture of the radiator/heat exchanger before I had installed it but if anyone is interested I can provide a link.
This is the finished product.
I disconnected the pump output line keeping it intact incase all goes poorly and I need to put things back like they were.
I took the output line and ran it to the top of the heat exchanger, from the bottom of the exchanger I ran a line to an automatic water separator then into the tank using the original line that I had disconnected. If cooling the air going into the tank makes it drop as much water as I think it will I'll attach a hose from the bottom of the separator to a container to keep from making a mess all around the compressor.
This is the exchanger (I think it is an oil cooler) attached in front of the pulley/fan of the compressor. I dropped it as low as I could so it does not affect the air moving over the cylinder heads.
I took a temp reading while the compressor was filling back up. This is off the cylinder side.
And this is taken at the tank side after the water separator.
Quite a difference.
It was quite a manly-man project. I made many trips to the manly-man store (Lowes) and stood in front of the Great wall of plumbing stuff along with several of our fellows in shame. Waiting for inspiration. I ended up using Flared fittings, compression fittings, Plastic fittings to repair an oops, and copper tube.
I think it is going to work.
Ken
While cruising the old interweb I found a video of a pre-cooler to lower the heated compressed air going into the tank.
I've taken a few photos of the project...I don't have a picture of the radiator/heat exchanger before I had installed it but if anyone is interested I can provide a link.
This is the finished product.
I disconnected the pump output line keeping it intact incase all goes poorly and I need to put things back like they were.
I took the output line and ran it to the top of the heat exchanger, from the bottom of the exchanger I ran a line to an automatic water separator then into the tank using the original line that I had disconnected. If cooling the air going into the tank makes it drop as much water as I think it will I'll attach a hose from the bottom of the separator to a container to keep from making a mess all around the compressor.
This is the exchanger (I think it is an oil cooler) attached in front of the pulley/fan of the compressor. I dropped it as low as I could so it does not affect the air moving over the cylinder heads.
I took a temp reading while the compressor was filling back up. This is off the cylinder side.
And this is taken at the tank side after the water separator.
Quite a difference.
It was quite a manly-man project. I made many trips to the manly-man store (Lowes) and stood in front of the Great wall of plumbing stuff along with several of our fellows in shame. Waiting for inspiration. I ended up using Flared fittings, compression fittings, Plastic fittings to repair an oops, and copper tube.
I think it is going to work.
Ken