What's better than canned air?

I bought a small air storage tank at Sears. Its a 12 gallon tank or something like that. I think it was about $40. At first I filled my tank at my fire house off our breathing air compressor, but that got to be a pain, so I bought a small air compressor (also at Sears, also about $40) The tank is good to about 200 PSI, and comes with a regulator assembly and hose. The compressor is good to 250 PSI so it fills it nicely. I added a coiled hose and blow gun attachment, and the system works quite well. The compressor is a tad loud, so sometimes I walk away and close my office door when it is filling (the tank does NOT have a blow off valve, so I can't walk away for too long or I risk overfilling, so mostly I just go deaf when it fills). The only things I don't like are it doesn't last very long. So I find I have to refill more often than I would like. Part of the rapid loss of air is because one of my connections isn't air tight, so if I leave the tank turned on, it slowly bleeds itself (it will go empty over night), but in general, a 12 gallon tank just doesn't last long (way longer than canned air however). Eventually I will replace it with a regular tank/compressor unit, but I'm not in any rush. Also, make sure you use some kind of a regulator so you can adjust pressure as needed. The first time I used mine, I had the pressure up to about 80 PSI and I went to blow the dust out of a floppy drive... I watched the drive head rip clean off and shoot out the other side and across the room. But the drive was real clean! I generally keep mine at about 15 to 20 PSI for most work, going up to about 40 if I am going after really encrusted dirt and dust on things that are sturdy (like a power supply fan). And the other major downside to all this... that dust has to go somewhere... so my work bench now has to get regular scrubbing to remove the crap that has gone airborne and resettled (and I'm afraid of what all winds up in my lungs). Because of this, I have tried to move to a vaccum for much of the initial dirt pickup, and switch to the air for the final details. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>