On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:55:36 -0400, DIYGUY
wrote:

Bought my new toys - a PC air compressor and a brad nailer. Now I need
to buy an air hose. So many choices! What is a man to do? Pliovic,
Ortac, Neoprene and more. Who knew air hoses could be so varied. Will


We work in new homes and normally have 1/4" x 50 footers hooked up.
If you don't need 50' just cut them in half and get a couple of
connectors.

We try about everything we see just to see if there is something
better. We've pretty much settled on using 1/4" Speedair rubber hoses
from Grainger. They are relatively inexpensive (I think we paid $22
for 50') and we have a Grainger locally so we just go pick them up.
We find that the rubber hoses are supple enough to lay down. Since we
walk over them all day they need to lay down. Some of the other
rubber hoses we've tried seem to turn hard after a year or two.

We've tried the orange plastic hoses and they stay a little too stiff
to suit me. Our nail salesman had some cool looking blue plastic
hoses that you could see through. They were very lightweight. You
could hardly tell they were hooked to your gun but they would not lay
down at all. If you could hang them from the ceiling they might be
okay but you couldn't walk over them. We also tried a red vinyl
coated hose that wasn't too bad. They were heavy enough to lay down
and the only problem was that the vinyl would crack at the fittings
after some time. We would just cut the cracked end off and crimp the
fitting on again.

Mike O.