[Shop-talk] More compressor questions

[David Scheidt]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 1:43 PM old dirtbeard <dirtbeard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> The oil-less compressors probably are good enough for casual use, but the
> ones that I have been around were noisy, probably because they tend to have
> aluminum blocks and that they tend to spin at higher RPM than the larger,
> heavier cast iron oil-type compressors.
>

There are two kinds of oil less compressor.  The really loud ones, and the
really quiet ones.  the really loud ones are cheap, which is their only
real redeeming feature (they have no oil in the air, which matters for some
applications, too.).  They have been around a long time, and basically,
they suck.  But they're cheap, so, they sell.

the quiet ones are not cheap, although prices have come down.  The best
known variety are sold by California Air Tools (they're made in china,
don't be fooled by the name.), but lots of people offer similar (or
identical) compressors these days.  For a given set of specs, they're much
of a muchness, and you'd do well to buy based on price, warranty, ease of
purchase, color, or whatever.
They reduce noise by having big pistons running at relatively low speed,
and by having lots of plastic and teflon parts.  They're not going to last
forever, probably a 1000 hours of pump operation.  I've got a little one,
with a 2 gallon tank, which I expect will last me years (it's used to air
up bike tires, dust off parts from time to time, and run a couple trim
nailers.).  On a job site, it'd be dead in a year, but it's likely to get
dropped, stolen, run over by a forklift, or otherwise killed first, so the
pump life span isn't a big a limitaion as it might seem.

If you're running shop tools using loads of air, like sand blasters, etc,
you want an old fashioned oil lubricated pump, rotating as low an RPM as
possible.  If you have lower volume air needs, the quiet compressors are
tempting.


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