New Altaros Booster

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ctshooter

ctshooter

Member
Oct 30, 2018
4,484
2,733
CT, United States
Long story short. With well over 600 hours my Shoebox is starting need more frequent repairs. The automatic pressure switch can't really be trusted and I'm popping the high side check valve o-ring too often and it's a pain to get to. With the moisture that has gotten into the Shoebox from shop compressor, even with moisture traps, the cylinders had corroded and last time I literally had to take the pistons off and bang one out hard with a hammer. 

While the Alkin is my dream, I don't have the $3000+ to put out towards that right now. 

The Altaros Advanced looks like a solid booster. Everything I've read, aside from xindaris' post, has been positive. Ordered last week and arrived today on my doorstep. Very simple to setup and get running. I like that it is quiet.

I realized the air usage would be higher with this compressor than the ShoeBox, but I think I'm going to give my little 1gal compressor a heart attack. I've slowed down the fill for a 80/20 work cycle but it's going very slowly. So of course I need bigger compressor. In comes the Amazon truck later this week with a 10 gallon 5.3cfm@90psi compressor. Considering that's about 5x the current cfm rating I think I should be good. 
 
If you place 2 pieces of foam rubber over the 2 outlets it stops hissing all together and goes super quiert!

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The beauty of desiccant is it's reusable. I have desiccant at home this is dark purple when dry, and turns pink when it absorbs moisture. When your desiccant reaches a place where you feel it needs to be changed because it has absorbed too much moisture, dump it onto a cookie sheet, and pop it into your oven on 300 degrees for about 30 minutes. This will evaporate all the moisture off of it, and the color will go back to the "non moist" shade. Then let it cool, and reuse it.
 
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I ordered one yesterday, my Shoebox welded itself together and into a fatal breakdown. I have been running a Hatsan Sparky while trying to makeup my mind.



Odoyle recommended I take a look at it. I did and was sold on it.

That auto cycling is a world above the boosters you toggle for each cycle.

The fragrance of oil stinking up my house was the other factor, I want to sell out in a couple years and move to asia, a house that smells like a 1950’s hot rod garage is a hard sell.



I have a 6gallon, 150 psi Harbor Freight shop compressor I bought to feed my Shoeboxes 10 years ago and a 60 minute tank, both of them have been sidelined since the Shoebox died. It is a bit loud, but HF still sells it and it has been reliable at $170.00.



iIf you get the kit to convert it to feed the air supply to be boosted fron a HPA tank, then just use the shop compressors to driver he piston, your fill time will be substantially reduced.



Regards,



Roachcreek
 
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Good tip - thanks. 

I notice your desiccant is turning slightly grey at the end. I'm seeing that with mine as well after running for 5 hours yesterday. About how long are you getting between desiccant changes?
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When the colour change from orange to bluish-pink in roughly half of the desiccant i toss it in the oven at 150degC~300degF for some 40min. A standard plate or flat dish is fine.

My Altaros desiccant filter runs for a very long time as i have 2 big desiccant filters between compressor and booster.

Mind you the Altaros filter "has" to be dismantled from the output side. Press the blue ring and pull out the airlines and just slide the filter from the holder.



https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32922060803.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.3b084c4dw0Zhqc
 
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I ordered one yesterday, my Shoebox welded itself together and into a fatal breakdown. I have been running a Hatsan Sparky while trying to makeup my mind.



Odoyle recommended I take a look at it. I did and was sold on it.

That auto cycling is a world above the boosters you toggle for each cycle.

The fragrance of oil stinking up my house was the other factor, I want to sell out in a couple years and move to asia, a house that smells like a 1950’s hot rod garage is a hard sell.



I have a 6gallon, 150 psi Harbor Freight shop compressor I bought to feed my Shoeboxes 10 years ago and a 60 minute tank, both of them have been sidelined since the Shoebox died. It is a bit loud, but HF still sells it and it has been reliable at $170.00.



iIf you get the kit to convert it to feed the air supply to be boosted fron a HPA tank, then just use the shop compressors to driver he piston, your fill time will be substantially reduced.



Regards,



Roachcreek
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Amen to that!

Fed 100bar~1500psi directly to the HP piston from a bottle will let me fill my 9liter(95'ish cf) bottle from 240bar~3480psi to 340bar~4900psi in under an hour using nothing but a 0.75HP compressor for work air. When there is no hurry i top up the feed bottles while doing other chores.

Fed from a big shop compressor or from a regulated bottle this will be done in mere minutes!
 
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ct shooter,

I have a question regarding the shipment from Altaros,times and tracking.



I ordered a bottle regulator on 1-26 or 1-27. Altaros got it out quickly to CZ post, and they sent it abroad on 1-28, great so far, but since that date 13 days ago, USPS has the message Preshipment, origin post is preparing the package.



Altraros has been great, they say they wait 3 weeks until they check, which is fine.



My questions are:

Did your package show up on USPS tracking, or did it just arrive with no tracking.

How long was the time span from CZ post sending it abroad until USPS took possession.

Thanks,

Roachcreek
 
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Now that I got the faster CAT compressor fill times are pretty decent. About as fast if not faster than the Shoebox. Just note this compressor uses a LOT of air.

Altaros - 1.1613171189.jpeg


To those that mentioned using one tank to fill another - that's not really why I bought this compressor. I bought it to fill tanks - eventually one of those lower PSI tanks is gong to need a refill anyways. When shooting at home I usually fill my tanks to 300 bar and then top off when they hit 250 bar.
 
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I have filled from tank to tank before when I had the manual toggle type booster, on that unit you had to add some more expense and plumbing.

knife uses two tanks per day, while I may go through a tank in three weeks, so slow is okay with me.

My big question is how well my 10 year old HF 6 gal 150 psi compressor drives and furnishes air to the booster. Tranisioning to tank to tank wii lower the work load of my shop compressor. The 6 gal compressor was a replacement for the little HF pancake compressors,2 of them, that died trying to run the Shoebox I first got 10 or 11 years ago, the 6 gal did fine. If it does not do the job on the Altaros booster, I will need to crush the numbers between two options, 1 get a nice bigger quieter running shop compressor and option 2, buying another expired tank and fill assembly to go tank to tank and use my present shop compressor only as a drive unit. To refill the donor tank takes less that 5 minutes so that is no problem. I can go either way, a quiet runn in model would be nice as my 6 gal compressor will wake the dead when it comes on, but I use that noise often to camafauge shooting my noisier airguns. As of now, it is cheaper to go tank to tank.

Regards,

Roachcreek
 
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@Roachcreek. It seems the most important factor for fill speed is the cfm rating on the compressor. Also the bigger the low pressure air tank the faster you can push the Altaros and maintain the 60/40 duty cycle on the shop compressor. 

When I did the first fill with a tiny 1 gallon CAT compressor it took about 6 hours to fill from 3000 to 4500 psi on a 3L tank. With the newer 10 gal CAT I did the equivalent fill in about 1hour. 

I'm going to fill my 9L tank today from 3500psi up to 4500 psi. This would be about 3 hours on the Shoebox. I keep track of how long it takes. 
 
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The $25 kit supplies hoses and adapters to run the compressed air from the LP stage back into the work air supply and a foster to 4mm hose adapter.

Altaros does not gurantee the booster with more than 100bar~1500psi fed into the HP stage so some sort of regulator is a must.

This is an external regulator whish can be used to feed the booster or to shoot tethered with a rifle at the range.

The gauge shows regulated pressure!

https://www.altaros.cz/en/airforce/89-external-airgun-regulator.html

external-airgun-regulator.1613330567.jpg

 
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