Day 73 My (actually Carmen's) Air Compressor
I was tidying the bench and thought it was time to do the regular maintenance of my air compressor, and while I had it out, I thought that perhaps it was worthy of its day in the spotlight of my garage gem series.
First of all, it's not really mine. Carmen decided that we needed one, and so she actually bought this one. Our air compressor needs were pretty modest: we needed something that could blow dust off of things in the shop, and power some basic air tools, mostly nailers.
So we did what you do when you are buying a tool that you aren't 100% certain you need: you go to Harbor Freight and pick up the middle of the road model that they have. This is a 10 gallon 125PSI model made under the Central Pneumatic brand. I don't think they distribute this model any more, but a similar model would be this 10 gallon McGraw, 135PSI. There isn't anything fancy about this, it.. well, compresses air. Most of the time it is attached to a blow gun so that I can use it to blow dust off of things, but I do use it for nailing as well.
One thing that's kind of annoying (a feature which is shared with other air compressors) is that it's fairly loud. In itself, that's not too bad for the intermittent use that I put it to. But when using it in high volume applications it drains pretty quickly, which means that it cycles fairly often.
The only other annoyance that I have is the oil level indicator. It has a little visual port on the side that you can use, but it's mounted fairly low, and is hard to read unless your eye is pretty much level with it, which means that I end up having to get down on my hands and knees to do so, which as I get older isn't my favorite thing. I almost wish it just had a conventional dip stick.
I have a couple of accessories that I use with it. In addition to the blow gun, I have a variety of inexpensive nail guns, from pin nails (which I use a fair amount) to 16 gauge nails, as well as a couple of different varieties of staples, including Arrow T50 staples. I keep the ones I seldom used in a dedicated tool bag (along with other accessories) but I made this French cleat to put the ones I use most on the wall.
Someday perhaps I'll get a larger one, probably with a vertical tank to both raise the controls to a more accessible level and to preserve the relatively small footprint. This is sort of a luxury item for my shop, but every time I use it I'm glad I have it.
Hope you all have a good week.