I tackled one more project this past week. This one has been on my schedule for a long time, but I never knew quite how I was going to make it work, so it was something of a pet peeve project of mine.
I ordered the ARB aluminum 1ga. air tank when I got the twin compressor thinking I would be able to cram it in somewhere...
My initial plan was to put it in the rear compartment where the factory jack is kept. It DOES fit there...but only the tank fits. Getting enough room to fit the tank, air fittings/lines, and mounting brackets/hardware would be pretty much impossible without taking apart the entire back of the truck. So I went looking for another place. Inside the engine compartment is a no go, i couldn't fit one more thing in there if I wanted to. Under the truck also wasn't going to work for a tank of that size. So then I dropped the bumper again (I'm getting really good at that, I can do it in about 5 minutes now, I will be taking challengers at the next t4r.org campout) and figured I could cram it between the headlight and the DRL/Fogs.
This is what I am talking about here:
A quick note about the connections. The ARB tank uses JIC4 connections. Which is just weird. These fittings use a different flange that is angled differently than a normal NPT and BST fitting to allow it to contain thousands of pounds of pressure. Since I only needed it to hold about 200psi max, I just grabbed an adapter to go from JIC to NPT. Then I put on an NPT elbow joint to get more room, and finally a pressure connector. Here is the final result minus the pressure connector.
Anyway, back to mounting it. In the above picture, you can see that it is on the passenger side. I originally tried to mount the tank there and then realized this was a bad idea for several reasons. First, i would have to extend the air line to make it work as the the current air line only reaches to the back (where the compressor is), not the front of the engine compartment. Second, mounting the tank would be tricky as the passenger side of the engine compartment is completely crammed with stuff due to the fact that I put a full size battery in the aux spot when it wasn't technicallyyyy supposed to fit there...So I would have to remove the battery which isn't a walk in the park at all. Third, drilling to mount the tank here would either take a very steady hand, or a lot more work as the washer fluid reservoir is directly behind the metal you have to drill through. So I decided to avoid all this and mount it in the same location, but on the drivers side.
So here's the bumper and headlight removed:
I drilled 3 new holes for the tank, the 4th hole (bottom left) would have been impossible to access from behind so I just left it off, three should hold the tank just fine.
Attaching the tank:
Plumbing it: The fact that it is on the drivers side makes the tank a million times easier to run air lines. The existing air line that I had entered the truck through the drivers side grommet, and then ran along the back of the engine compartment to the compressor on the passenger side. So all I had to do was disconnect the line from the compressor and run it straight to the tank.
I then got a new line and ran it from the tank back up to the rear of the engine compartment, and back across to the compressor like the old air line.
Mounted and plumbed!
I mounted it with these steel spacers to offset the tank from the wall a bit. This helped it sit even as there a some ridged in the wall where the tank gets mounted.
Here it is sitting with the headlight back installed, fits perfectly.
Now the tank is in line between the compressor and my rear air quick connect. I did some timing tests just to see how much more air this was giving me. Before the tank the system would pressurize to 160psi in 6 seconds, and that would give you 3 seconds of pressurized air until the system was empty. After the tank, the ARB twin takes 45 seconds to pressurize the entire system to 160psi and about 20 seconds of pressurized air (using a standard air gun connected to the quick connect).
So far the on board air system has no leaks and is working better than expected! I now have capacity to run air tools and do a lot more with the on board compressor!