Oh yeah! The rear bumper is 3/16 wall thickness and is capped at each end. I`m hoping it can hold enough pressure to air up my tires from 10 to 20 psi (trail pressure/ street pressure). I`ll have to pull out my old physics textbook to look up the formulas for pressure/volume and see if it`s doable.
It's doable, but do the math to convince yourself that it will work.. I use my sliders in the same manner..
A couple of folks posted alarmist posts about exploding sliders, etc on the dangers of doing this.
The concern expressed was air pressure loading on the tube end caps. Calculate the surface area of the end caps and multiply that by the maximum air pressure you will use. And if the end cap welds are questionable or unknown, reweld. You may need to do this anyway to get rid of pin hole leaks. On mine if I remember correctly I had about 1.5 sq in of area on the end caps so with 100 psi I would have 150 pounds of force exerted on the steel caps. Not too much of a load for 60,000 psi yield strength DOM steel to handle.. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />
When I did the reading to research this whole subject, it turns out that the using relatively narrow diameter "tube tanks" versus larger diameter open diameter tanks was the technological break through that permitted widespread deployment of steam power plants without the explosion dangers of early tank type boiler systems.. Did a little reading on the history of Babcox/Wilcox who came up with this.
You might also notice that tractor/trailer size tanks used to transport liquid oxygen and other very high pressure compressed gases use multiple relatively small diameter "tube tanks" versus larger single tanks for the same safety reasons...
I also poured POR-15 inside the tubes to coat the internal walls to prevent rust that would occur due to condensation that will be present in any air compressor tank.
