I have been in the scrap bin again chaps and I thought this bit of info could be useful. Our fridge freezer died last week due to a gas leak and whilst fault finding it, I stupidly blew up the electronics control board.
:'(. Well, that put the kiss of death on the machine so I scrapped it leaving SWMBO none too happy.
As I no longer allow anything of any value to go to the local tip, I removed the compressor and took it into the workshop. These are superb low volume high pressure units, ideal for silent operation where small air quantities are needed, as in airbrush work.
I had the remains of a small workshop compressor, waiting its turn to go to the tip and still had the tank assembly as the motor had burnt out. This been discarded so I decided to fit the fridge compressor in its place.
I fitted four long 8mm bolts with associated nuts and washers onto the fridge unit, retaining the rubber grommets on the unit and welded them onto the old tank mounting plate. Using some of the salvaged pipework from the fridge, I silver soldered it to the existing tank feed pipe and fired it up. Result, one very very quiet compressor and air on tap when I need it.
The tank unit still had its pressure switch fitted and this activates at 100psi so that it now turns the fridge compressor off when the whole thing comes up to pressure .
Now, I know its not beautiful but it's very functional and works really well and for its full function test, it has been running the V twin oscillating engine from my earlier post all day long.
Think twice before you dump that old fridge, you are throwing away a really high quality air compressor and even if you don't have an air receiver to attach it to, a simple airline from the output pipe to your airbrush will allow you to spray all day long in deathly silence. You would be advised to fit some kind of air leak via a T piece in the line so you can regulate the flow to your airbrush but that wouldn't be very difficult to achieve. The only problem you might encounter using this basic method might be oil which could find its way down the line so I would advise some kind of chamber to act as an oil collector between the compressor and the airbrush. You can buy these items from spray equipment suppliers but even if you had to do that, it's a very cheap compressor indeed.
As a word of warning, you should be aware that although these units produce a low flowrate of air, they DO produce a high pressure and this is in excess of 100psi so take heed if you play around with one and in the absence of a pressure guage, you would at least need some kind of safety valve, even if it was as simple as a piece of silicone tubing which would blow off the end of a T piece in your line.
Now to cover my bum and applying the customary enviromentally friendly approach, I am not advocating that anyone dumps refridgerant gas into the atmoshere when removing a compressor unit, so if in doubt, you can have it removed by a competent person and before anyone jumps on me, our fridge had a fractured pipe so the gas had already escaped!
