BRE Fabrications LTD
Well-Known Member
At the beginning of the year I was in the states for a couple of weeks and managed to pick up a Viair 450c on board air kit for a really good price. So since the weather has perked up somewhat I crawled under my 80 to see where I could mount the tank. After much head scratching I relegated to the fact that I don't have enough room to mount the tank anywhere.
I initially wanted to mount it the way the Chris did on GW but turns out the LPG tank is a fair bit deeper than the spare would have been so that was a no go.
Anyway so not wanting this bit of kit to gather dust any longer I chose to mount it in the boot. Now I didn't want to loose too much boot space so I mounted it above the wheel arch, which is generally lost space anyway.
So first mission was to come up with a bracket of sorts to hold the tank. I don't use the third row seats so I decided to recycle the seat mount.
Not wanting it to rotate freely I welded up the joints. Tip: If any of you decided to ever weld these mounts make sure you remove the plastic bushes. Burning plastic stinks...
Next I used a bit of 2" x 1" 1mm box section I had lying around alond with some 1" angle to make a platform for the tank. I then welded this onto the seat mounts.
Then painted it and mounted it up.
I made up some feet for the compressor as well out of the box section I had. This is bolted to the boot floor with some rivnuts. you can see these in the above photo.
The rest of the install is basically as per the manual. Pretty straight forward. I did hash up the gauge install though...
Initially i tried to mount the gauge pod where the gaping hole is, but turned out the wasn't enough room for the air line which comes straight out of the back of the gauge. Plan B, which turned out to look a lot better, was to remove the gauge and switch from the pod provided and mount it directly into the gear lever cover panel thingy (no idea what the correct name is)
I have the Viair kit running now but i still want to install an air point under my bonnet as well as one closer to the tail gate. The only issue I think I still need to sort is the power. At the moment is does seem to be taking a fair clip l,onger to fill the tank than stated on Viairs website, but they also state the compressor shout be as close to the power source as possible. Now this is where you electric boffins need to chime in. I am using the supplied 12awg power cable, but because the compressor is about as far from the battery as it can be I think I need to run a bigger cable, like a 10 or 8awg. Would this help with getting more amps to the compressor? And would this in turn make it perform a bit better. It draws 19amps @ 13.8v. Now I have measured the voltage it's getting which is 13.8 but I don't know how to measure the amps it's pulling
So far my impressions are that it seems ok, would be better if the tank filled as quickly as the web sates. Only downside is that once the tank is empty, which with 33's happens fairly quickly then you have to either wait for the tank to fill again and give the tyre another blast or leave it connected. But then you are essentially filling the tank and tyre at the same time.
Once I have resolved the power thing I'll report back.
I initially wanted to mount it the way the Chris did on GW but turns out the LPG tank is a fair bit deeper than the spare would have been so that was a no go.
Anyway so not wanting this bit of kit to gather dust any longer I chose to mount it in the boot. Now I didn't want to loose too much boot space so I mounted it above the wheel arch, which is generally lost space anyway.
So first mission was to come up with a bracket of sorts to hold the tank. I don't use the third row seats so I decided to recycle the seat mount.
Not wanting it to rotate freely I welded up the joints. Tip: If any of you decided to ever weld these mounts make sure you remove the plastic bushes. Burning plastic stinks...
Next I used a bit of 2" x 1" 1mm box section I had lying around alond with some 1" angle to make a platform for the tank. I then welded this onto the seat mounts.
Then painted it and mounted it up.
I made up some feet for the compressor as well out of the box section I had. This is bolted to the boot floor with some rivnuts. you can see these in the above photo.
The rest of the install is basically as per the manual. Pretty straight forward. I did hash up the gauge install though...
Initially i tried to mount the gauge pod where the gaping hole is, but turned out the wasn't enough room for the air line which comes straight out of the back of the gauge. Plan B, which turned out to look a lot better, was to remove the gauge and switch from the pod provided and mount it directly into the gear lever cover panel thingy (no idea what the correct name is)
I have the Viair kit running now but i still want to install an air point under my bonnet as well as one closer to the tail gate. The only issue I think I still need to sort is the power. At the moment is does seem to be taking a fair clip l,onger to fill the tank than stated on Viairs website, but they also state the compressor shout be as close to the power source as possible. Now this is where you electric boffins need to chime in. I am using the supplied 12awg power cable, but because the compressor is about as far from the battery as it can be I think I need to run a bigger cable, like a 10 or 8awg. Would this help with getting more amps to the compressor? And would this in turn make it perform a bit better. It draws 19amps @ 13.8v. Now I have measured the voltage it's getting which is 13.8 but I don't know how to measure the amps it's pulling
So far my impressions are that it seems ok, would be better if the tank filled as quickly as the web sates. Only downside is that once the tank is empty, which with 33's happens fairly quickly then you have to either wait for the tank to fill again and give the tyre another blast or leave it connected. But then you are essentially filling the tank and tyre at the same time.
Once I have resolved the power thing I'll report back.
Cheers Ryan.
