I have been a Shoebox user for almost ten years, and I absolutely love how great it is as a “set it and forget it” compressor to fill tanks. My Shoebox Max is in its tenth year, having about 270 hours of run time on it (with only one “rebuild” along the way) and I figure it has compressed over 1800 cubic feet of air to 4500 psi, filling tanks hundreds of times. I do feel (or perhaps mostly hope) that it will run for many more years, but some of the recent posts I have read about failures and parts concerns had me thinking about having a backup plan. At first was thinking of more tanks, as having full ones around would buy me time to figure out what I want to do next if mine were to die – but in truth I love the Shoebox and don’t really want anything else; the slow speed is not a “bug” to me but a “feature” that leads to robustness, and I just let it do its thing while I do other stuff like yardwork and such. When the chance came to buy a lightly used F10 with less than 10 hours on it, I simply could not pass it up – that became my long-term backup plan!
The F10 is beautiful, but I have to say it runs almost scary fast – I honestly think the box is running too fast for its own good. I had some experience with changing pulleys around on my Max – I “upgraded” it to an F8 pulley a few years ago, and while that had it running (and filling) noticeably faster I felt it was still running well in control. The original Max pulley had it chugging as a very slow speed, and I think that the F8 pulley is probably the sweet spot to balance speed of fill and longevity of the compressor. That got me thinking that maybe the F8 pulley would be good to put on the F10 to slow it down and reduce the loads, hopefully leading to a much longer life – while it would technically “run longer” in terms of absolute hours, the key thing really is the number of strokes the pistons take. That is what defines the amount of air compressed, and slow would mean less heat and load on the bushings and other parts, so it should last longer to compress more total air over its life.
So I performed the swap, but also captured before and after videos to show how the speeds compare. The first video shows the Max with the F8 pulley compared to the stock F10 speed, and the second video shows the Max with its original pulley back in it and the F10 with the F8 pulley. You can clearly see the difference between all three pulley speeds. I can report that the Max pulley has only 10 cogs in it, the F8 pulley has 13 cogs, and the F10 pulley has 20, so that gives you the relative differences.
Here are the fill rates into my Guppy tank from the different compressors and configurations – do note that in all cases I feed the units air at 95 psi, which also reduces the load vs. 125 psi:
This has me thinking I’ll revert my F8 pulley back to the Max, and run it until it dies, and then break out the F10 and begin using it (hopefully in the very distant future). I will say that I got the F8 pulley as a spare part back before the store closed, so I don’t know how to get others short of buying F8 compressors, or having one made. But I thought I would share what I learned on this with other Shoebox owners. The videos are only a few seconds long. In playing them before posting I notices I mispoke in the second video, saying that I had the F10 pulley in the F10, but it is really the slower F8 pulley (I show the F10 pulley out of the unit). Enjoy.
The F10 is beautiful, but I have to say it runs almost scary fast – I honestly think the box is running too fast for its own good. I had some experience with changing pulleys around on my Max – I “upgraded” it to an F8 pulley a few years ago, and while that had it running (and filling) noticeably faster I felt it was still running well in control. The original Max pulley had it chugging as a very slow speed, and I think that the F8 pulley is probably the sweet spot to balance speed of fill and longevity of the compressor. That got me thinking that maybe the F8 pulley would be good to put on the F10 to slow it down and reduce the loads, hopefully leading to a much longer life – while it would technically “run longer” in terms of absolute hours, the key thing really is the number of strokes the pistons take. That is what defines the amount of air compressed, and slow would mean less heat and load on the bushings and other parts, so it should last longer to compress more total air over its life.
So I performed the swap, but also captured before and after videos to show how the speeds compare. The first video shows the Max with the F8 pulley compared to the stock F10 speed, and the second video shows the Max with its original pulley back in it and the F10 with the F8 pulley. You can clearly see the difference between all three pulley speeds. I can report that the Max pulley has only 10 cogs in it, the F8 pulley has 13 cogs, and the F10 pulley has 20, so that gives you the relative differences.
Here are the fill rates into my Guppy tank from the different compressors and configurations – do note that in all cases I feed the units air at 95 psi, which also reduces the load vs. 125 psi:
- Original Max: 27 psi/minute
- Max with F8 pulley: 33 psi/minute
- F10 with F10 pulley: 50 psi/minute
- F10 with F8 pulley: 33 psi/ minute
This has me thinking I’ll revert my F8 pulley back to the Max, and run it until it dies, and then break out the F10 and begin using it (hopefully in the very distant future). I will say that I got the F8 pulley as a spare part back before the store closed, so I don’t know how to get others short of buying F8 compressors, or having one made. But I thought I would share what I learned on this with other Shoebox owners. The videos are only a few seconds long. In playing them before posting I notices I mispoke in the second video, saying that I had the F10 pulley in the F10, but it is really the slower F8 pulley (I show the F10 pulley out of the unit). Enjoy.
