welding Q

By welding the tank (and heating it unevenly), you can change hardness and brittleness in certain areas and make it susceptible to failure.

I would use this as an excuse to buy a real compressor. I owned a HF compressor at some point too, what a POS.

"Ignoramus4939" wrote: By welding the tank (and heating it unevenly), you can change hardness and brittleness in certain areas and make it susceptible to failure. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I absolutely agree with "Iggy." If you have to weld to the tank itself, you run the risk of weakening it. You don't want to risk a pressure vessel explosion.

However, if the broken compressor supports broke a short distance from the tank, and you can tie back to them without welding on the actual tank walls, you can probably do a safe repair. There must be wheel/axle brackets, handlebars, etc, which did not break. Maybe you could tie onto those and construct a new compressor platform.

Or, how about putting both pieces into a "little red wagon" and pulling that around the yard? :-)

Been there, done it. If you don't know how to do it, a good welder can do it easily with either TIG, or wirefeed. I used wirefeed on mine. Just build up the area where the welds are.

Most small air compressors operate at about 135psi tops. This is not enough to cause a catastrophic failure that would involve metal being flung about. The failure does not happen that way. The metal does not disintegrate in small chunks, but mostly tears. And that includes pipes caused to burst by intentional overpressurizing.

If you are unsure, just get another compressor. Do whatever you feel comfortable doing. For me, I simply welded mine back up, and it has been working fine for three years now.

Steve

At the very least, get yourself a better tank, mount it separately from the compressor and feed through a flex line. This way you can mout it on a wagon and move it much more readily and with lower CofG. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

That depends on the size of the tank. Compressed air can be very dangerous.

On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:38:42 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "brassbend" quickly quoth:

In that case, don't even THINK about welding it. Build a nice indoor holder for it and next time, string air hose out to wherever you need it. It's a LOT lighter and quite a bit easier.

- Don't be a possum on the Information Superhighway of life. ----

Note the word "small" above.

STeve

Don't know about spotweld, but it would be easy to MIG. If the tank is galvanized, welding will burn the zinc off the inside in the HAZ. Harbor Freight...galvanized tank.....riiiiiiight!

We are talking about a portable compressor. It can be expected to be dropped, or have something dropped on it, it could simply hit some heavy metal object when moved around. So, any stress and fracture prone areas would present more opportunities for failures, than for a stationary compressor.

I would not want take any risk of failure for the "reward" of restoring a POS compressor.

I guess small is relative. Old 2 piece truck tires are around the same size and pressure that you are talking about. They've killed plenty of people that didn't respect them, or know how to service them properly.

I'm not saying you don't know what you're doing. I'm simply stating that whoever you give advice to may not know how much stored energy they are dealing with. Your advice could cause the death of an uneducated person.

You misquote me, sir. ALSO in that post was the caveat for the person to do whatever they felt was the safe thing to do, and if they didn't trust the thing to get another.

In the future, please post things in context.

I'm sorry, I don't see how I misquoted you. I did snip some of what I considered immaterial content, but I thought I got the meaning of what you were trying to say. Like I said, I'm not trying to attack you. It sounds to me like you have a good understanding of what you are dealing with. I'm just concerned that some lurker may not.