Nice project! Neat and organized. It would look entirely out of character in my shop.

I would suggest you change out the end elbows for tees and install a 6" "dirt leg" in those locations as it is an ideal location to collect water if any should condense. Install the ball valve or pet****s on the bottom of the "dirt leg" for drainage and system bleed down.

Black iron is the preferred material for air systems. PVC is dangerous when it splits, the appropriate copper is expensive and hard to work with (silver soldered joints etc.) and galvanized flakes off and screws up stuff. I have been running black iron in this shop for 30 years and have zero trouble with rust contamination.

 

Thats a good idea. Thanks!
Funny thing is, I bought all the (4) 3/8" T from the local hardware store (lowes) last week
Not sure when they stock up.

 

The manifolds I've seen done up are usually made with thru drilled round or square stock, then they cross drill and tap them to 1/4" NPT. Works great if you have someone with access to a decent sized lathe and long bits.

 

Unfortunately I don't have someone with this equipment. It would be a nice project, but I'm not sure if it would be possible to drill a 20" (length) hole to have a good spacing?
The existing manifolds had the holes too close together. For a simple practical reason I wanted to have lots of space when I change a hose even with gloves on.

 

Looks good.

How did you attach the manifold to the rack?

 

Its welded on. Not the prettiest ones, but done fast with low input to avoid overheating the teflon.

 

A very clean good looking set up. I was just thinking today about what a mess I have running from the air compressor. Glad you posted the manifold...Richey

 

I probably would have clamped it on. A pipe is still a really small pressure vessel, in a sense. Although, 3/8 schedule 40 has a pretty decent wall thickness to ID ratio, so it'll probably be alright. You could always hydro test it to 1.5 times the working pressure. :waving:

 

I agree but come on are you really worried? I'd be way more concerned about the air tank on the compressor than a short run of black iron pipe.

 

Thanks richey

dbotos, I wasn't sure if it was best practice at all to weld a black pipe, but it seemed so practical. Yes, a clamp would be probably the best.

 

Better black pipe, than galvanized.

I'm no pipe-welding expert, but if I had to make recommendations on welding a longitudinal tab on like that, I would say you'd want the toes of the beads nice and tangential to the OD of the pipe with no undercutting (like a good bead of caulk) and then wrap the beads around the ends of the tab so there's not a sudden discontinuity. If you really wanted to get nitty-gritty, you could do some kind of controlled post-heat and cool down and maybe even some peening...

 

Not really. 3/8 schedule 40 is 0.091" wall and 0.493" ID. Working pressure is almost 1800 psi and burst is over 10,000.

 

Wouldn't think twice about welding that pipe. Good practical solution.

 

I weld up fittings, lines and manifold type things all the time, as long as the internal air volume of the component isn't huge (think container or air tank) then it's not really a problem at all, the worse that could possibly happen even with a catastrophic and immediate failure would be like blowing an air hose but without even the whipping effect, truth is it's not going to fail like that anyway, even if you welded the hell out of it. larger tanks contain a lot of energy and the wall thickness-container size ratio is very low, here the wall thickness-containment ratio is so high that a smaller fitting like this could see way more than just 150psi before any danger of rupture at all.