Harbor Freight compressor repaired!

I had bought a cheap Harbor Freight air compressor for some small stuff around the house so I didn't have to drag my 30 gallon rolling compressor around which gets awkward for small/quick needs.  I knew they are not great quality but figured I wouldn't be using it all the time. One day my wife had a need at work though - she needed an air source to blow the dust out of computers at the schools she works at.  I figured this was a good use for the harbor freight unit so I toted it out to the car with a good air house and a nice blow gun setup.

When she got home that night, she said it worked fine until it stopped working completely.  Uh oh..  Note, I know she wasn't at fault - some of this equipment just has some flaws.

I had planned to look at it for months now and had left it sitting in the corner of the garage. I finally got around to looking at it about a week ago and quickly found that the tube from the compressor to the air tank and snapped in half at the point of one of the compression nuts.  The tube is relatively thick walled and appears to be aluminum. After a bit of research and trips to Lowes, I had what I needed - a piece of 1/4" soft copper tubing and 2 new ferrules.  I ended up just reusing the existing nuts.  I was going to replace both the nuts and ferrules but it seems like an odd size which wasn't at Lowes at the time.

I didn't end up using the compression nut/inserts in the pic below - the thread size didn't match what I needed but the copper tubing was fine - just needed to cut an appropriate size chunk off of it.

You can see pretty clearly the wall thickness difference between the 2 tubes.  I did some some quick checking to determine whether the copper tubing was too thin for this use but all the numbers I found indicated it was more than adequate.  The compressor only goes to 100 psi.

You can see the break in the original tubing here and I'm showing the copper tubing with the a new ferrule on one end along with one of the original nuts on it.

Just to add a bit of safety factor, I tested the compressor up to 60 psi and left it for a few days - it held the pressure with no leaks.  I then filled it to 100 psi and left it for a few more days and it has not leaked air yet.

You would think that I was done at this point but I found that I didn't keep the tube bend low enough which results in it preventing the cover from being reinstalled.  I'll handle that shortly - at least I know this works overall.  I did find that I have to be extremely careful with the copper tubing though - it will kink pretty easily when bending.  I could probably find a few ways to help reduce that - heat it up with a torch to soften it a bit more and maybe run something inside of it like a couple decent diameter wires to help limit the kink.  Just need to be careful to prevent getting the wires stuck.

Below pic is before fixing the tube bend to prevent interference when putting the cover back. The copper tube is in the mid/lower foreground.