On Sun, 07 Sep 2003 20:15:43 GMT, (Barry
Jarrett) wrote:


i need to rig some sort of air cooler/dryer for my compressor w/o
spending a lot of money or taking a lot of space. i've seen some
drawings of nice setups using iron pipe to cool the air and provide a
drain for water. any reason i can't use hard wall copper pipe
instead? max pressure is 150psi, which is about what the copper
tubing in an espresso machine deals with. copper, for me, is much
easier to work with, and means i can build something nifty, like a
water-cooled condenser to pull the moisture out of the air system.

I knew a guy that painted aircraft that used about two hundred feet of
1/2" soft copper tubing in a 55 gallon drum. The copper came in 100
foot coils and he opened the coils up until they had a few inches of
clearance on the drum walls. I think one coil went down to the
bottom, the second coil was joined to it with a compression coupling
and it came back up inside, concentric with the first coil, at a
slightly smaller diameter.

The drums were filled with water, setting on a poured slab hanger
floor at ambient temp (probably in the 50's and 60's most of the time.
He also had some good water traps and filters in his system. He said
he could get very dry air at a stable temperature out of this. At the
paint gun it warmed slightly as the day progressed but not very much.

We talked once about the pros and cons of routing the air from the
compressors through the cooling coils and then into the 60 gallon air
storage tank to minimize temperature variations and condensation in
the tank but I don't know that he ever got around to doing that.

He was concerned about the volume of air that would be contained in
the coils between the unloader and the tank inlet check valve. That
was one of those simple mechanical unloaders on the pressure switch
relay that pressed a Schraeder valve. I thought that it having to
release a larger quantity of air when the compressor shut down would
not make any difference in the way it worked but we were not sure
about that.



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