Re: Shop realities
Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2018 4:23 pm
I went from a 60 gallon "5 (chinese) horsepower" oil bath cast iron "Industrial" (so the label said) Husky. It was quite adequate for almost everything I wanted to do. But the blast cabinet would bring it to its knees. It would run constantly, and never catch up until I gave up and let it. This Curtis is only 20 gallons bigger on capacity, but it's in a completely different league. It works to keep up with the blast cabinet, but even die grinders, orbital sanders, and buffers only make it earn it's keep. I had to modify (clearance and slot some hole in 3/16-1/4 steel) some parts on my latest desert truck with carbide burrs yesterday. 3 die grinders mounted with different burrs hot swapped as needed. I didn't count, but seems like it cycled maybe 5 or 6 times tops, certainly not running constantly, couldn't say how much run time, but it wasn't a little. The same thing on my old Husky would have had it running constantly to melt down if I didn't give it breaks. And even better than that, you can carry on a fairly normal conversation while it's running 20 feet away.
Anyway, 60 to 80 gal isn't the primary differentiator. It's the pump rating combined with motor rating. As someone explained to me when I was thinking of adding a secondary tank to help my old Husky, adding capacity is a very small part of the equation, and can actually hurt by forcing an overloaded pump/motor to keep running longer to top up the capacity in order to take a cool down break. Curtis used to have a lot of useful detail on their website regarding how motor power combined with their various pumps produced different capacity, but now it's been converted "sales driven", and none of that is available that I could find. I couldn't even find the page that used to differentiate the pumps.
Anyway, 60 to 80 gal isn't the primary differentiator. It's the pump rating combined with motor rating. As someone explained to me when I was thinking of adding a secondary tank to help my old Husky, adding capacity is a very small part of the equation, and can actually hurt by forcing an overloaded pump/motor to keep running longer to top up the capacity in order to take a cool down break. Curtis used to have a lot of useful detail on their website regarding how motor power combined with their various pumps produced different capacity, but now it's been converted "sales driven", and none of that is available that I could find. I couldn't even find the page that used to differentiate the pumps.