Carbon Fibre SCBA/Paintball (Compressed Air) Tanks?

Wondering if anyone here has ever tried making something like this

Not saying I ever will, but I am intrigued & wonder what the pitfalls are of DIY…

The biggest issue is the risks and liability from shrapnel propelled at 4500 PSI.

I can’t imagine myself ever figuring that this price wasn’t cheap for peace of mind.

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I’m going out on a limb and guessing you didn’t watch the video attached to that product…

Brief summary:

Grab an aluminum tube and metal spin the bottom and top shut. Tap a regulator in it. Use a 5 axis wrapping robot to weave individual carbon fibers around the tube. Vacuum bag and pull epoxy through the carbon fibered mummified aluminum tank.

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Some team members on a project back in school worked with a composite tank manufacturer to design some custom tanks for us… I remember a lot of thought went into the wrap angles, pitch, layers, etc. It was quite the process.

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By leaving part of the aluminum cylinder, the composite fibers are only stressed in tension and you don’t have to worry about making it airtight. You also don’t have to seal it to the threaded part, since you can just leave the aluminum as normal there.

You could buy an aluminum tank, and using a lathe, take off part of the thickness. Then use a CNC filament winding machine to create the shell. To start with, you could use fiberglass sleeve, which won’t corrode and has a similar thermal expansion coefficient to the aluminum.

The difficult part is doing the engineering analysis, then testing it and validating the sample, including fatigue cycles and UV degradation. The question is, why would you do any of this, when you could just make a webcam aimbot? Just have it like, vector the air inside of the bolt to a different parts of the uhh, paintball, causing it to like curve due to Bernoulli’s principle. Or just put some rubber wheels inside of the barrel. Duh.

Edit: Have a gyroscope or a reaction mass inside the marker, and then use magnets or solenoids so when you pull the trigger it jerks the marker in the correct direction to account for wind correction etc.

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Modifying an tested pressure vessel I think is extremely unwise. While a common item, they are highly engineered/designed and produced with controlled proven processes. I seriously doubt the pressure rating based of wall thickness is linear.

At the very least do ALL of your pressure testing and cycling using hydrotesting and not compressed gas, If you have a failure, it’ll rupture and just a squirt water - with compressed gas it’ll be like a bomb.

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Unless you’re making a nice smoker :smiley:

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