How much good would your pneumatic system be without any fittings? Considering that these are what allow you to connect pipes and hoses together, your system probably wouldn’t be worth very much without them. Nevertheless, they’re a portion of many people’s systems that don’t get nearly enough attention. You’ll want to find a connection that works best for your system and is made from a material that you prefer.
We’ve made sure to stock only parts made from the finest combinations of different components. You can trust that you’re getting exactly what you need when you order from our organization.
Just take a few moments to familiarize yourself with all of the different components you may come across when browsing through a catalog or a schematic listing.
Types of Pneumatic Fittings On The Market
One-touch fittings are a great example of a style of pneumatic air fitting that’s designed expressly to save you some time when working with them. These are capable of being attached or detached with the slightest amount of pressure, so you won’t have to go around twisting components into one another when you’re pressed for time and need to get an installation up and going as fast as possible.
That being said, they’re more than durable. The fittings are quite capable of standing up to a fair amount of abuse provided that they’re always used expressly within the specifications laid out by the original manufacturer.
Keep in mind that this should be done with every component for safety’s sake. Thus, there’s no reason to look at this as some kind of weird limitation that’s peculiar to these. In fact, they’re designed very well and should be able to handle a fairly large cross-section of situations that you’d need to use them in.
Over time, these have become popular with those who need to deploy pneumatic gear on a regular basis. While you might have seen manufacturing organizations that install their equipment in semi-permanent or completely permanent workshops, that’s not always the case.
These fittings have become popular with individuals who need to pack up their vehicles with all of their compressed air-driven tools and drive them back and forth to different sites. If you’ve ever tried to set something up out of the back of a van without the appropriate tools, then you likely know the value of one-touch fittings in this respect.
Threaded fittings are eternally popular as well, especially for those who need to display various permanent installations like those used in the manufacturing example. You might want to screw two threaded fittings together and leave them be. Depending on the type of material they’re made out of, you might not need to perform any further maintenance on them after this.
Standard materials that you’re likely to find pneumatic fittings made out of include brass, polypropylene, fluorescein, aluminum, and stainless steel. Of these, brass fittings have the benefit of being relatively lightweight, inexpensive and easy to shape. That makes them the best option for anyone who is trying to design an installation on a tight budget and can’t run the risk of going over it while laying out their project.
Stainless steel fittings are corrosion resistant and can handle a large number of temperature ranges. Considering that all air includes at least some degree of moisture regardless of where its source is from, you’re likely to appreciate this corrosion resistance. That’s made stainless steel connectors the choice of countless individuals who have to work in a variety of mission-critical applications where they can’t risk a breakdown.
Technicians are sometimes willing to look at the purchase of slightly more expensive stainless steel components as a long term investment that can actually translate into a healthy level of cost savings. Companies that purchase pneumatic fittings and connectors made from this material are unlikely to have any need to replace them soon, which is why they’re often looked at in this light. You’d possibly need to replace a plastic connector far more often than this.
That being said, there’s any number of other ways to specify the type of connector or fitting that you might need. So far, we’ve divvied up fittings based on the material that they’re made from and the way that they attach. However, you’ll also want to put some thought into the sizes that they ship in.
Sizes Of Pneumatic Fittings & Connectors
Just like with screws and any other type of hardware that you might run into, pneumatic fittings and connectors are normally found in a number of standard sizes. At one point, these sizes wouldn’t have been quite so standardized, however. You would have likely seen them in a number of proprietary ones that made it hard for different pieces to interface together. That was a mess that took a great deal of work to clean up.
Instead, your technicians can trust that anything you run into at the current moment will be at least compatible with an adapter in the future. Take a moment to think about what life might be like if every industry, not just the pneumatics sector, had taken this approach to customer service.
Find A Wide Range Of Pneumatic Fittings At SMC Pneumatics
Fortunately, SNC Pneumatics we offer all of the sizes that you’d expect from the standardized component catalog SMC has to offer. You won’t have to worry about picking something today and not being able to find a match for it tomorrow.
Granted, there’s always the possibility that you’ll run into a specific unusual use case that you might not be all that familiar with. If that sounds like the situation that you’re currently grappling with, then you can contact us online at SMC Pneumatics and get in touch with one of our seasoned representatives. They’ll make sure to help you find a product line that fits your organization’s needs as well as the type of equipment that you’re currently running.