Compressor base

Back in ’02, I bought a run-of-the-mill, five-gallon, five-horse compressor that ran off of 120 Vac. Fine for filling tires, but as I quickly discovered, it was not at all adequate for sandblasting.

So in May ’05, I bought a BIG compressor:

A Husky Pro VT6314, 7 hp, 11 SCFM at 90 psi, just enough flow capacity for blasting. The compressor arrived strapped to a pallet, and the instructions said that it was supposed to be bolted to the floor during use. I didn’t want to scar my garage floor with anchors, and I didn’t want to transmit vibrations into the slab, either. So I built a free-standing base for it:

The main frame is built from 4x4 timbers and lag screws.  The compressor is attached to the base through vibration-isolating pucks:

and the base itself sits on vibration-isolating feet:

The compressor itself is a noisy beast, but the whole rig does not walk around at all, and the noise is entirely airborne; none of it is being transmitted to the garage slab or house foundation. Air is piped into the basement, where it’s fed through a dew trap, a coalescing filter, and a desiccant dryer before reaching the sandblaster. A separate line brings dried air back out to the garage, where it supplies the hose reel that’s attached to the compressor base.  In the photo of the whole base (3 shots up), you can see the supply/return hoses penetrating the house wall in the photo above, just to the right of the compressor.