Porter-Cable Compressor/3-Tool Combo Kit Price: $154.99 Shipping Options:: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 1-2 days (Monday, Dec 22 to Tuesday, Dec 23) + transit Condition: Refurbished
I have one of these. It’s an awesome little kit. Great for short air use projects. The tank isn’t complicated to use if you are new to the air compressor game. With the nailers and stapler this is a great deal.
Yes, like the Mr. Pyrobedlam states above, it isn’t big, don’t expect to run your angle grinder all day on it without over taxing the thing, and your ears.
In addition to the nail’n I use it to fill tires, clean out the bed of my truck when the broom won’t do, etc… Because of it’s size you can plug it in, let it run to fill it, then un-plug and carry it to where ever you want to use it.
One last thing. If you buy it do yourself a favor and pick this kit up too:
The PorterCable kit I had didn’t have any of it’s valves or one of those nice blower thing-ies. It’s kind of a must for an air tool owner. Don’t forget to teflon tape your screw joints.
Another thing to keep in mind, particularly if you’ll be using it in a somewhat enclosed area, is that these little pancake compressors are loud. If that’s an issue, check out the California Air Tools compressors, which use dual cylinders and thus run at half the speed of a comparable non-oiled compressor.
They may run at half the speed of a single cylinder compressor but they STILL have the same amount of compression strokes as as a standard compressor with one cylinder. It’s those compression strokes that account for the noise, so equal compression strokes = nearly equal noise.
In addition, the dual cylinder compressor is far more costly to build than the single cylinder compressor. Check the price and ask yourself if you’re willing to pay that additional price for very little savings in noise level.
Don’t know about the quality of the compressor, but the Ryobi has a larger HP motor and the crown stapler has a larger range of staples that it accepts.
The Ryobi however is listed as louder, if that is important. It appears to be the same as a Ridged vertical pancake compressor that HD used to sell, both have received good reviews.
The real driving factor is the rating SCFM@90psi. That’s the volume of air the compressor will move at pressure. For this one it’s 2.6scfm @ 90psi. For larger motors it’s anywhere from 3.5 on up.
I ended up picking up a cheap 5 gallon air tank for around $35, and using it as an extended reservoir. The advantage for me is that moving a pancake compressor and a separate tank is a lot easier than moving a 5 gallon compressor. The disadvantage is the extra cost for fittings to connect everything together. however, when the compressor does need to cycle, it cycles for a solid 10 minutes.
For grinding tools and sandblasters, that’ll really slow down some people, but I just sandblast and then have a beer and then sandblast more.
The compressor is $99 new (not refurb) on Amazon. Home Depot is selling a similar 18g brad nailer for $14 right now, and they had a 4-nailer combo on sale for around $50 yesterday. For refurbs, this isn’t much of a deal, in my opinion.
I bought all of these tools new to do some finish work on floors I had installed in my house. I would recommend them new for small DIYers that don’t want daily use out of these tools, but I can’t speak to these particular refurbs. Although my experience with woot! refurbs is the items mostly come looking and functioning like new without the warranty.
I can testify to the fact that it is loud, but also if you are using it with the included tools it won’t be an issue. Laying down quarter round on my entire first floor and I believe the compressor re-filled once, maybe twice at the most.
FWIW, have most often found that factory refub eqpt is generally better than new, because everything is checked over by factory techs. If anything is the slightest smidgeon out-of-whack, it’s replaced and adjusted to meet specs. You end up getting better than production run.
