It's hard to refill because most places don't fill, they only do exchanges. They ship the empties to a filling station.

I wouldn't say it's too dangerous, just pointing out the dangers. After all, it's about safety. You don't smoke while you reload do you? Why do you wear a holster? At least partly for safety, right?

If you are giving quick bursts to clean, and it's an occasional rather than constant thing, you shouldn't have problems with CO2 buildup, however you might want to be careful about small pets in the area, CO2 is heavier than air I believe and will settle on the floor. Fine for you as long as you don't knock yourself out, but it might be an issue for any ankle-biters that you have.

I got a good chuckle out of that

There's dangerous and then there's DANGEROUS. I guess there's also unnecessary risks or less safe practices.

Personally, not being a reloader, I would suppose that a CO2 tank used to blow / dust off things is no more dangerous than an air compressor. My issue would come in with the use of air to blow powder / lead dust / etc associated with reloading around.

If I were being particularly careful, I'd wear a fine particle dust mask and use a toner / fine particle vac in the other hand so I'd be blowing the dust into a known place and disposing of it. It's like cleaning the known dirty location by releasing the particles into the air to drift and deposit .... where?

I have item-hand-mouth cycle aged children right now so I'm a bit more inclined to worry about where the stuff goes.

I do all my loading in a little work area off my garage, so there's little chance for that stuff to get into the house proper, and I keep my 3 year old out of that area as well, in addition to shop-vaccing the area every so often (I always use the drywall bags, not the crappy round paper ones).

I could see where the dust would be an issue inside of the house, but its generally kind of a messy deal and I can't see doing it inside anyway; there's just too much mess generated under normal operating circumstances.

I'm at the stage of thinking, reading, and learning so I'm working through my thoughts on some of this.

Doesn't powder need to be in a temperature and humidity stable environment to get consistent throws?

Powder measures on Dillon equipment are volumetric, and humidity and temperature can affect powder throws. But its usually a day-day kind of change, and the most I've noticed has been maybe a .5 grain change and that's with a radical change in weather (very humid & hot to cool and dry).

Quite often its stable for many days at a time -- I've loaded one night and then gone back to finish a batch the next day and when I check the powder throws the second day, they are spot-on. Sometimes even a week or more later, they're still accurate.

But I *ALWAYS* check before loading to ensure that something stupid hasn't happened.

I finally got off my keester and stopped into Toll Welding Supplies in Plymouth.

Looks like for $160 I get my own 5lb cylinder, a fixed regulator, a blowgun valve and some coiled hose. CO2 is $21 per fill. A case of 12, 12 oz cans of dustoff is $45 shipped from Costco.

I don't know what the gas volumes of the difluroethane (dust off) vs. the CO2 is, so I don't know what the real cost comparison is, but the guy did say that the "printer guys" buy this setup instead of dustoff.

He was totally unphased by my desire to use it as a duster, and Toll claims to be employee owned, which is another benefit, although I think the hose + blowgun parts could be bought cheaper at Home Despot.

Regarding the CO2 cylinders for paint-ball guns:

The local Dunham Sports store fills these for $0.25 per ounce, so they're a bit less than buying cans of it. The 20-ounce canister might last a while and you can buy larger ones.

jb

You might consider one of these:

or for 99 dollars just buy a baby compressor, it only runs when you want it, the rest of the time is sits quietly waiting for when you need it to fill a bike tire, blow off your bench, fill beach toys for the kids, and there is no refill cost.....

With my luck, it will break when I want it to work. And even the smallest seem larger than a 5 gal CO2 tank, and much louder when running.

Believe me, I've thought about this.

Yeah. Just make darn sure than if you ever have an ND, the bullet goes someplace harmless, like into your leg, rather than into that cylinder. You really don't want to find out how dangerous liquid CO2 can be...

OTOH, if you have a shop fire, your CO2 tank can also be pressed into service as a fire extinguisher.