Do people refurbish these or buy an off the shelf alternative? A lightweight corrosion resistant composite would be nice. Fittings are standardised, aren't they?
Try a carbon fibre SCUBA tank. Nice and light, good to 3,000 PSI so 150 PSI will never worry it, never corrode, various sizes available.
The weight hardly matters, Its a Rangerover after all.
It is quite a substantially made tank. Take it off, wire brush it and paint it. Good for another 20 years.
I use cure rust gel and black hammerite underneath.
I did refurb mine - ground off the paint and rust where it was bad, and repainted with a heavy duty metal paint. I dare say the finish won't last overly long but it certainly got through the MOT (which is what I was concerned about).
One thing, if you do this, I’d get nuts welded onto the fixing bracket towards the rear of the tank, and then I’d slather the bolts in anti-seize of some sort. Fitting it back in, without captive nuts is a real pain. It’s one of those things that is probably fitted to the chassis before the body goes on.
There’s a couple of pics on my ‘ups and downs’ thread - which I hope to begin updating again soon!
I've only ever seen a couple that have been badly rusted (donmacn's being one of them) but I can't see how it would be an MoT fail unless it is actually leaking.
Defect Category
(a) A gas, air or fluid suspension system inoperative Dangerous
(b) A gas, air or fluid suspension system component damaged, modified or deteriorated in a way that:
(i) it would adversely affect the functioning of the system Major
(ii) its function is seriously affected Dangerous
(c) An obvious leak from any part of the system Major
I was thinking mainly in terms of reliability. A cluster of things in the EAS have gone wrong of late. This seemed a likely candidate, Down there in the salt!
Gd - if I’d looked at the testers manual I might have been less concerned! I’ll confess I do look at pressure vessels like this through a scuba diver’s lens. I have about 10 or 12 tanks in the garage, get them tested regularly - and I just didn’t like the look of my reservoir.
Chasman - there really isn’t much to go wrong with the tank is there - assuming it’s not leaking. It could only be the O ring in the drain plug, or the two in the collet. They’d be easy enough to change in situ to see if they’d help make your system more reliable. Then you could decide later whether or not to refurb the tank for the longer term or cosmetic reasons.
I worked on my tank, replaced the compressor and serviced the valve blocks, new air springs all round, replaced the sensors, and the car still slowly settles if it’s not used - though I haven’t done the calibration process yet.
Although there isn’t much to the reservoir tank mine suffered a leak in the weld where the neck of the airline tube housing was welded into the main tank body. Took ages to find as I put soapy water all over the collet and air pipe, and the drain plug, but not around the weld on the neck! Eventually I did and, hey presto, the tell tale bubbles - only a very slight leak but a leak all the same.
I didn’t have a welder at the time and my current diy home MIG welder isn’t up to the job on that thickness of metal anyway. It was more expensive to pay someone to weld it up and test it than buy and refurbish a second hand one off the bay of e. It looked pretty ropey when I received the eBay offering but it was just surface rust and cleaned up really well, was treated with rust prevention and then given three coats of Hammerite. Looked like new.
I noticed my car was loosing pressure from the tank overnight and I found that my EAS reservoir was leaking. It passed an MOT like that last week. Mines in a pretty sorry state so I'll be buying a used one and refurbing.