Air dryers ?

Just a quick update on what I did for air drying. Being in Florida it is an issue so I did both refrigerated and desiccant. The refrigerated unit is a Harbor Freight. Works better than I expected! I had to redo a lot of the insulation inside as it is poorly done however. After shopping around and having sticker shock on the prices, I decided to make my own desiccant dryer. It is made from 4” x 1/4” pipe with 1/2” thick ends I turned on my lathe. I put a 45 deg. chamfer on them so I could really weld them up. Caps and nipples are 2-1/2”. Overall it is about 40” long and holds around 20 lbs of desiccant beads. Cost about $30 in misc. and welding materials - the main pipe, 1/2” plate and angle I already had. I am working on a solution to the caps as I don't like the pipe thread tape and the caps needs a bit of torque to seal down. So I am thinking of brazing on a couple big nuts and pouring some 70 shore urethane rubber into the caps to act as an internal gasket. Everything is enclosed in a “shack" I built on the back of the shop mainly to keep the noise of the compressor out of the workspace. I added some cross ventilation to keep the heat from building up. That’s it!

 

man you have one heck of a nice setup, hope to stop by someday soon and talk shop /swap ideas joe c