Air compressor saga
A friend of mine gave me a 30gal air compressor when he moved a while back. He thought it was missing a part because it "sprayed" oil when it ran. I just stored it until I set up my garage after we moved & then I thought I'd look into getting a 'real' air compressor working (I have a little 2 gal for topping off my motorcycle tires).
It's an older version of this one:
Kobalt 1.6-HP 30-Gallon 155 PSI Electric Air Compressor
Thinking it was probably low on oil from "spraying" when it was last ran, I picked up a quart & poured some in. I couldn't see any movement on the sight glass, so I just put the fill plug back on & ran it. It POURED out of the pressure relief holes in the fill plug (brass insert in the black hex fill plug below).
Not having a need for it at the time I let it sit for quite a while and decided to look back into it since I could use air assistance while I'm working on this project. I talked to a co-worker about it & tried to figure it out just from descriptions. We thought that maybe it was over-full, instead of under-full. So I went to Lowes to talk to them about it & after reasoning through it with the salesman and the manual we agreed with the assessment that my co-worker & I had.
Yesterday, I drained it, the drain plug was still painted on. Without thinking it through, I used an empty pop can, which filled almost instantly. Then the empty quart oil container from my previous troubleshooting attempt. I dropped the drain plug in the quart jug and it was showing no signs of stopping. So, I plugged it with my finger when the quart got full and had my son grab my wife, who saved me with an empty 1 gallon ice cream container.
After consolidating my 3 containers I still ended up with half a gallon of oil from the case & I'm pretty sure it didn't dip below the sight glass until under half a quart. I probably had close to .75 gallons in it at the most over-full.
So, I'm going to grab a fresh quart & carefully fill to the top of the sight glass & give it another go. If that's all I have to do to fix it, this will be a CHEAP air compressor for me!
...to be continued...
-Chaz