talk to me about compressors (not for lazy folk trying to inflate tires)

want to drive impact driver (mostly) , cut off , nibbler and occasionally a spray gun for doing panels and little bits and bobs rather than whole cars.

obviously dont want to have huge system- although i do have a small shed backing onto the garage it could live in and plumb the garage up to it through the wall.

What litreage and CFM should i really be looking at –

if anyone suggests waiting for the aldi one – well …

What is the beef with the Aldi ones? Saw them the other week in the shop by the beach in Aberdeen and was thinking humm if only i had the space that could be quite handy.

You need someting biggish for spraying and certain air tools. I bought a 3hp 150 litre tanked one. I cant remember what the FAD was. Free Air Delivery is more important.

thats what i needed to know mcmoonter

the aldi ones dont have the oomph to spray and odd fitments

Can I hijack this for a minute? I’ve often wished for a compressor, but not had enough reason for it. However my car needs some spray work – would a compressor and spray gun be better than halfords cans, and how expensive would i tbe for the basic stuff?

throwing a brick at the car often leaves a better finish than a halfords spray can !

I’ve done reasonable jobs in the past with them. Trick is to do it with zero wind which is almost impossible to achieve outside. Most of my dings are on the bonnet, so I’ll remove it and do it in the garage 🙂

ive only ever done arches on an escort – metalic silver – that was never going to end well !

so i ended up with 2 nice lighter flatter silver patches round my arches – but it hid the rust nicely !

need to do the mrs golf – where considerate **** at her work have opened doors into the rear arches! – its a similar colour to my escort – ive since read up alot and realise where i went wrong and decided its good justification for a compressor (so i can get an impact gun for my landy so i can get the rear tub off and get a roll cage fitted)

I’ve never had great results using a nibbler with a compressor, you run out of puff very quickly. Mains powered ones are much better (I know the air ones are loads cheaper but they just don’t really work unless the compressor really is enormous – and I found punches and dies very fragile on the air ones)

Unless the action is pretty intermittent then 25ltr direct drive compressors are pretty useless for what you want, the noise of them is awful too – urgent, penetrating annoyance. You can’t spray with them, a nibbler will only cut a few inches at a time, impact drivers won’t have much impact. The little ones are best for things like nailers and staplers – where you get quick smacks of power rather than trying to draw volumes of air at pressure. They just break, overheat, leak, bits fall off – my current one the cut off has stopped working, the wheels have broken off and it now sits of pathetic little wooden stilts- it just runs continuously, blowing off the excess pressure, rattling and nasty. I just keep it for nailing when i need the portability

I’ve also got a 100ltr 13 CFM one. Main benefit of that is its belt driven and quieter/softer sounding. Better for spraying (I don’t paint with it as I’ve already got an HVLP blower thingy- but I loan it out the the scenic artists to use when I’m set building) and better able to take sustained use.

But then you’re talking about got something much bigger and more expensive (£500 or more, mines at the budget end of the spectrum) I can just get it into a van but you wouldn’t want to move it often. I only bought it for a job where I had several joiners needing airlines for nailers – we were working in a huge old concrete bonded warehouse that was the most awful echo chamber and the little direct drive compressors were actually wanting to make me kill, so I bought the biggy for a quieter life and recouped a chunk of the cost by hiring it on the the scenics afterwards.

Unless you’ve already got the air tools (and even if you could) for the price of a capable compressor and the paraphernalia you could buy a cordless impact driver (the 1/2″ ones often turn up cheap), a mains nibbler (I got my hitachi one second hand but un-used for £100 odd on ebay- and infact ‘Ive never used it) and good quality 3 stage HVLP paint set up (mine was £300 or one)

And…. forget about getting a belt drive compressor to turn over on a frosty morning

interesting input there mac – someone who knows his onions by the looks of it

my experiance of compressors is limited to the monster set ups we have in our workshops which drive our impact drivers and nibblers and haskel pumps just fine but im only involved in end use not set up and specification – and even then im only involved if the shit has well and truely hit the fan i try to stay the hell out the shop !

You might be right about going down the electrical route -noticed corded impact drivers with decent break out torques are coming down in price crazy fast and that means less space needed to store a compressor and no hoses going about the place all the time.

ill go have a look at hvlp stuff as i have not even heard of that till now !

HVLP stuff is interesting – its a blower/turbine rather than a compressor. The main benefit is more of your paint actually hits the thing you’re painting, and less ends up atomised floating around the room

If you want to use a compressor to spray paint, or use high volume air tools (rattle gun uses quite a lot of wind) you’ll need at least a 100L tank, and probably 10CFM upwards.
Loads of secondhand stuff about, although the bigger stuff does tend to be 3ph (415V).
We’ve got a 250L, 12CFM, 3ph, belt drive compressor which must be 25+ years old, it doesn’t get much use now but would plod away all day when we were spraying a lot of paint with it.

So how do you get hold of appropriate paint for a car body?

trade account at a local motor factors who does it for me i checked recently as i want to do the roof on my landy …..

does help that they supply the local body shop next door so not all motor factors may have it !

So how do you get hold of appropriate paint for a car body?

from a shop that sells car paint, my local one mixes the paint in-store and sells it either in rattle cans or in pots to brush or spray.

However because there are tighter rules now on VOCs you might find them unwilling to sell to you if you’re not trade.

Right.. what I would quite like is a very small low flow airbrush for small touch ups.. would a model one work with that kind of paint?

EDIT thinking about it, they use that kind of thing for graphics and whatnot, don’t they? Ok so more expensive than I am likely to be interested in… But the real problem with spray cans is too much flow over too large an area.

You’d need to thin the paint to suit the brush, sold in the pot its quite treacly. How good the covering power is once you’ve done that for an airbrush I’ve no idea

EDIT also. There are touch up paint sprayers that are smaller than regular spray guns

Thanks.. this is looking like a goer. I have loads of small scratches and chips on the Prius, two or three of which are developing rust spots.

It could be a worthwhile investment in terms of the value of the car.

If you’re after a compressor always try and get one that has a higher output than you think you need. My 2p