My First Compressor - Help with Vintage and General Advice

[chrismac]

Drive pulley hasn't been welded.

No but in the first image 4 out of the 6 spokes on the driven pulley have been by the looks of it.

The pulley has not been welded. Look closer.

 

[Dragnet]

Motor is less than a hundred years old!

Possibly worth filling the receiver completely full of water and hydraulically testing it at 50% above the working pressure. A grease gun can raise the pressure as long as there is no air space. Some use a pressure washer to carefully raise the pressure to the test value.

It is a pulley, not a flywheel (which would be a dangerous repair). I would think (a guess) it’s likely no later than 1950s.

If the 1, on the motor plate, indicates 1 HP, it won’t provide so much free air, but should be easily sufficient for a small spray gun (possibly not an external fan(?) type sprayer). likely 2 or 3 cfm at most.

That's a good point about the hydrostatic testing - I did the grease gun trick on mine (though I used a Wanner oil gun as my grease gun just leaked the water out again...).

I understand from reading around the subject that, as another posted mentioned, a pinhole is the most likely mode of failure rather than a burst balloon. There's always going to be one place that becomes thinnest first and that means there's unlikely to be a similarly fragile fault line all around the receiver. After bonging mine with a hammer and finding nothing obviously untoward I just use it and drain it and think 'que sera, sera'. It's probably rather more dangerous to use the 240V die grinder; it's certainly my most terrifying tool.

 

[dave h 2]

These old recievers are sometimes coated with oil, one I had was, blew out mayonnaise on blowing down