1.1 CFM Air Compressors?

[ChuckDickerson]

What air compressor did your team use this year? Given the increase in the allowable air compressor CFM rating to 1.1, I am wondering what new legal compressors teams have found.

[wilsonmw04]

We used a Thomas 215 this year. It run below the 1.1 CFM limit, but the rate at high pressures made it a great compressor to use this year. It does run hot, however. A fan on the piston housing cooled it nicely.

http://www.gd-thomas.com/templates/p...t.aspx?id=2722

[Ben Martin]

We also use the Thomas 215. It's worked nicely for us for three years.

[AllenGregoryIV]

We used a viair 98C. However there website is now listing a higher CFM because they are using 13.8V instead of 12V this wasn't the case during build season. The ones we own list a 1.10 CFM at 12V directly on the compressor. I may need to call Viair and see if we can get 12V specs for their compressors published again.

[Michael Hill]

Where are you purchasing the 215 compressor? The only place I've seen is here: http://cfpwarehouse.com/shopsite_sc/...oduct2931.html

But it looks super sketchy.

Do you contact Thomas directly?

[cbale2000]

The VLAIR 330C-IG is rated to 1.06 CFM at 12V and is 100% duty cycle, so no more overheating if it runs constantly...
The downside of course is that it also weighs over 8lbs.

Would be handy if you needed a lot of air pressure and had spare weight to play with I guess.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

The VLAIR 330C-IG is rated to 1.06 CFM at 12V and is 100% duty cycle, so no more overheating if it runs constantly...
The downside of course is that it also weighs over 8lbs.

Would be handy if you needed a lot of air pressure and had spare weight to play with I guess.

Eyeroll completely inappropriate here. This is probably the perfect off-board compressor. You don't care about weight, and the fill-rate should be comparable to or better than the 98C or 100C. If you've got a ton of air to store, it's not going to mind running forever, either.

I'm not clear on why everyone is so big on the Thomas 215. Unless the viair 98C and 100C suffer significant performance hits for running at 12V instead of 13.8V, it seems like they have better flow rates and fill rates than the 215.

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

The VLAIR 330C-IG is rated to 1.06 CFM at 12V and is 100% duty cycle, so no more overheating if it runs constantly...
The downside of course is that it also weighs over 8lbs.

Would be handy if you needed a lot of air pressure and had spare weight to play with I guess.

Anyone have experience with this compressor? Advice on where to buy?

We ran an off-board set up this year and loved it, I don't think we'll go back to on-board any time soon.

However, our old trusty Thomas compressors are getting old, and we are looking to upgrade. This looks like a great alternative.

-Mike

[Cash4587]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

Anyone have experience with this compressor? Advice on where to buy?

We ran an off-board set up this year and loved it, I don't think we'll go back to on-board any time soon.

However, our old trusty Thomas compressors are getting old, and we are looking to upgrade. This looks like a great alternative.

-Mike

I really enjoyed how your cart included the compressor and water bottles for the drive team. How many pneumatics did you actually have on your robot this year to be comfortable not running a compressor on the robot? How long would it take to fill up your robot air tanks?

I am a bit skeptical of running no compressor on one of our teams robots. Especially with our pneumatapult on our bot this year.

Also not that I have any experience with the compressor but, Amazon seemed to have some comparable prices for the 330C-IG.

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Cash4587

I really enjoyed how your cart included the compressor and water bottles for the drive team. How many pneumatics did you actually have on your robot this year to be comfortable not running a compressor on the robot? How long would it take to fill up your robot air tanks?

I've attached our calcs for this year, using 1114's pneumatics calc sheet.

We had 8 tanks, all roughly the size of the black Clippard tank.

It took about 5 minutes to charge using an old Thomas compressor.

-Mike

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

I've attached our calcs for this year, using 1114's pneumatics calc sheet.

Could you post the link for that calculator? I've been looking for something like this.

[BenB]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

Could you post the link for that calculator? I've been looking for something like this.

Here's a more recent version of the calculator. We added extend and retract pressure in case we wanted to use inline regulators to save some air when we don't need as much force in one (or both) directions.

We've been using the compressor off-board since FIRST opened up the pnuematic air tank rules in 2011 to allow plastic air tanks, and haven't looked back.

[galewind]

Originally Posted by cbale2000

The VLAIR 330C-IG is rated to 1.06 CFM at 12V and is 100% duty cycle, so no more overheating if it runs constantly...
The downside of course is that it also weighs over 8lbs.

Would be handy if you needed a lot of air pressure and had spare weight to play with I guess.

We had the weight to play with it and used it on-board. Loved it. We had issues with the little kit viair because as it started going south, it seemed to give us issues with the PCM, causing all of our pneumatics to fail. Simple solution is to mount it with a spike, but we opted to go bigger this year. HAD to use a spike because of the higher AWG wire.

Edit: The only issue we had was when we mounted our fittings into the head, we over-torqued it and cracked the head. We had a high-strength epoxy we used around the fitting and didn't have any issues.

[Electronica1]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Where are you purchasing the 215 compressor? The only place I've seen is here: http://cfpwarehouse.com/shopsite_sc/...oduct2931.html

But it looks super sketchy.

Do you contact Thomas directly?

We got ours from http://www.ridetech.com/store/215-th...or-100psi.html

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Electronica1

We got ours from http://www.ridetech.com/store/215-th...or-100psi.html

Thanks. I was searching too narrowly I guess. I was searching for "215ADC38/12". I lose 5 Google-Fu points.