EXAIR’s Safety Air Gun Promotion Offers Free High Velocity Air Jet

Published on by Jordan T ShouseLeave a comment

From August 1st to September 30th, 2025, with qualified purchases, EXAIR will be giving away a free Model 6013 High Velocity Air Jet with a purchase of our Safety Air Guns, including the VariBlast Precision, VariBlast Compact, Soft Grip, Heavy Duty, Super Blast and TurboBlast Safety Air Guns.  We are promoting the importance of safety in the workplace with the EXAIR Safety Air Guns.   

Compressed air guns are one of the most commonly used pneumatic products in manufacturing plants.  They are used at workstations to blow off debris and clean parts and tools.  Because of the large quantities that are used in a plant, they are the most targeted by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration).  The majority of the common brands of airguns fail to comply with two directives, rule 29CFR 1910.95(a) for noise levels and rule 29CFR 1910.242(b) for dead-end pressure.  The reason for this is due to the type of nozzles that come with the typical compressed air guns.  OSHA fines can be very expensive, and you can alleviate these penalties by purchasing an EXAIR Safety Air Gun.  Safety is everyone’s responsibility: management, the HSE department (Health and Safety Engineer), supervisors, and even the operators.   

With EXAIR Safety Air Guns, we supply an efficient, effective, and, most importantly, safe air nozzle with all of our air guns.  They are CE Compliant and exceed the OSHA sound level and dead-end pressure requirements, even above 30 PSIG (2 bar).  With substandard air guns, the operators will have to listen to loud noises all day or wear hearing protection.  And for the dead-end pressure, the EXAIR nozzles are engineered to not allow the operator to completely block the end of the nozzle with their hand or skin.  This is very important because if the pressure exceeds 30 PSIG, air can penetrate the skin and cause an air embolism.  With our design, the compressed air is able to escape, and the pressure against the skin will not exceed 30 PSIG, even with the compressed air pressure set at 100 PSIG.  Safety is a major concern for all of our customers and a priority for EXAIR in manufacturing our products.   

As I mentioned above, the nozzles are one of the most significant parts of making a compressed air gun safe and OSHA compliant.  Combining our engineered nozzles with a quality air gun makes the EXAIR Safety Air Guns one of the best products in the market.  We currently have six different styles; the VariBlast Precision, VariBlast Compact, Soft Grip, Heavy Duty, Super Blast, and TurboBlast Safety Air Guns.  These Safety Air Guns are ergonomically designed to comfortably fit in your hand. They come with quality trigger mechanisms and durable valve assemblies.  The VariBlast Precision Safety Air Guns are great for tight spaces and clearing out small holes.  The VariBlast Compact Safety Air Guns have a cast aluminum body for rugged use with our smaller air nozzles.  The Soft Grip Safety Air Guns provide extra comfort for long, extended uses, and the Heavy Duty Safety Air Guns are rugged, heavy-duty industrial air guns with nozzles for larger forces.  The Super Blast and TurboBlast Safety Air Guns use our largest nozzles for cleaning large areas quickly.  In combination with the EXAIR nozzles, the Safety Air Guns can offer another important attribute; we can save you money!!!  Compressed air is very expensive to make, and with our Safety Air Guns, we use less compressed air but still create a strong blowing force.  We do this by entraining the free ambient air into the air stream.  If you increase the mass of air at the target, it will give you a hard-hitting force to remove debris from surfaces or clean tools and holes.  The amplification ratio can be as high as 25 to 1.  That means that for every part of compressed air that it uses, the EXAIR Nozzles will entrain 25 parts of free ambient air.  This will add mass to the airstream, which provides for a powerful impact.  Also, the payback period for using an EXAIR Nozzle with our Safety Air Guns can be within weeks due to the savings in electrical costs from your air compressor.  With EXAIR products, we were able to partner with Energy Star and power facilities.  For the amount of energy saved, some power companies offer rebates for using EXAIR products.       

A substandard blow-off gun is unsafe, loud, and wasteful.  EXAIR Safety Air Guns can help improve these situations.  They are OSHA-compliant, very safe, and very quiet.  They use less compressed air, which saves you money.  And with a variety of different nozzles, they can better fit your application to decrease downtime.  In the U.S. and Canada, EXAIR offers a 30-day unconditional guarantee on our cataloged items so you can try them out.  You can see for yourself how effective these compressed air guns can be.  If you need help matching the best Safety Air Gun to your application, you can contact an Application Engineer.  And during the next two months, take advantage of the free Model 6013 High Velocity Air Jet, a $103.00 complimentary gift.     

Jordan Shouse, CCASS

Application Engineer

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How Much Air Am I Using?  A Story About the EXAIR Super Air Nozzle.

Published on by John BallLeave a comment

At EXAIR, we always recommend using the least amount of pressure to “do the job”.  This helps to save money and save on compressed air.  But some customers wish to use outdated methods, like open pipes, copper tubes, drilled pipes, etc.   These methods are unsafe as well as waste money and compressed air.   EXAIR has engineered nozzles to help enhance your blow-off devices. Here is a customer that I helped recently, to tell a story about the EXAIR Super Air Nozzles. 

Blow off station

I received an email from an engineer who was looking at our Super Air Nozzles.  The characters of the story were four blow-off lines that were made from 6mm ID copper tubes.  (Reference picture above) The system was designed to blow out holes after machining.  The engineer oversaw the task of optimizing 25 machining stations and this was the theme of the story.  He purchased four Nano Super Air Nozzles, model 1110SS, for a trial.  He was impressed with the performance, the low sound level and the design for safety.  I would consider the Nano Super Air Nozzles as the protagonist.  But, for the upper management in his company to sign off, he had to show cost savings and improvements.  He asked me to help him to present this story in calculating the compressed air savings. 

He gave me some additional details about their application to build the plot of the story.  He was using compressed air about 50% of the time throughout an 8-hour day at a pressure of 80 PSIG.  He asked me to find a happy ending to this story with the annual savings and the payback period.  I did many of these calculations for other customers, and I was happy to help.  It is sometimes easier to speak in terms of money for everyone to relate to a situation, especially management.  (The numbers below can be adjusted to match your application and blow-off devices).

Knowns:
Cost of compressed air: $0.25/1000 cubic feet of air (this is based on $0.08/Kwh electricity cost)
Flow: 1110SS Nano Super Air Nozzle = 8.3 SCFM at 80 PSIG

A 6mm ID copper tube flow rate = 19.8 SCFM at 80 PSIG

The difference in compressed air flows from a 6mm tube to the Nano Super Air Nozzle is (19.8 SCFM – 8.3 SCFM) = 11.5 SCFM.  At a 50% duty cycle, we get 11.5 SCFM * 0.5 = 5.75 SCFM (cubic feet/minute) of additional compressed air being used.  Per year, the amount of compressed air wasted is:
5.75 Ft3/min * 60 min/hour * 8 hours/day * 250 days/year = 690,000 cubic feet per year.

With the cost to make compressed air at $0.25/1000 cubic feet, we are saving:
690,000 Ft3/year * $0.25/1000 Ft3 = $172.50 per year per nozzle.

From these values, we get the payback period for a model 1110SS Nano Super Air Nozzle to be just around 97 days. 

The remaining life of the Super Air Nozzle will save the company a lot of money by using less compressed air.  The calculations above are only for one nozzle.  As discussed above with the engineer, they had 4 tubes/station and 25 stations in their plant.  So, if you multiply each figure by 100, you can see the amount of money that can be saved; a total of $172.50 * 100 = $17,250 per year.  The engineer presented the complete story to upper management, and it was an easy decision to replace the copper tubes with EXAIR nozzles.

The moral of the story is, don’t be fooled by the upfront low cost of a tube, pipe, drilled hole, or a substandard nozzle. The operational cost outweighs the acquisition cost every time. With the characters, plot, and the setting of this story, not going with an engineered solution will cost you a lot of money in the long run.  With a mindset of taking total cost of ownership into account, another positive attribute is the improvement in safety.  EXAIR engineered nozzles are designed to be OSHA compliant. 

If you want help to write your own storybook, happy ending, you can contact an Application Engineer.  We will be happy to assist you in finding a hero for your blow-off stories.   

John Ball
Application Engineer
Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb

Photo: Book by Pezibear.  Pixabay license.

VariBlast Safety Air Gun Overview

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

After mowing the lawn, I always blow the driveway & sidewalk off with a leaf blower. Then, before pulling the riding lawn mower back into the garage, I blow off the deck with the leaf blower too, and it always looks like it does a great job. The other day, though, I had to replace the drive belts, so I removed the deck and found an awful lot of grass trimmings had accumulated in the inner recesses. No matter how much air my leaf blower moves (and it moves a LOT), I would have needed a much more focused flow to get into some of those tight spaces.

Situations like this are EXACTLY what EXAIR Safety Air Guns – especially the VariBlast Precision and Compact models – are made for. Consider:

  • Tight, focused flow – the VariBlast Precision Safety Air Guns can be fitted with our three smallest, most focused Super Air Nozzles – Atto, Pico, and Nano:
Not only do they create the most focused airflow patterns, these Super Air Nozzles are also small enough to fit in pretty tight quarters themselves.
  • Hard-hitting force – VariBlast Compact Safety Air Guns can also be fitted with the Atto, Pico, or Nano Super Air Nozzles for the tightest airflow patterns, as well as several others if higher flow & force are required.
For more aggressive applications, VariBlast Compact Safety Air Guns with 1″ High Power Flat Super Air Nozzles can apply up to 1 pound of force.
  • Extended reach – the VariBlast Precision Safety Air Guns are available with 12″ and 20″ 316SS extensions, and the VariBlast Compact Safety Air Guns can come with straight rigid aluminum extensions up to 72″ long.
  • Chip Shields – regardless of whether you need extensions for extra reach, these can all be supplied with Chip Shields. These are especially useful (and are included as standard) on the VariBlast Compact Safety Air Guns with Back Blow Air Nozzles.
Atto Back Blow Air Nozzles can blow out recesses or holes as small as 1/4″ in diameter.
  • Operator control – this is the key feature of the VariBlast models. Most handheld airguns have spool valve-type triggers that are really just on/off operation. They can offer some crude amount of throttling, but the variable pull trigger of the VariBlast Safety Air Gun provides precise control, and they’re ergonomic to boot. Here’s a short video that shows just how precise the control is with a VariBlast Precision Safety Air Gun.

Compressed air isn’t cheap, and if you use cheap, non-engineered blow-offs, you’re going to pay WAY more to operate them than you have to. If you want to find out how the VariBlast Precision or Compact Safety Air Guns – or any EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products – can help you get the most out of your compressed air system, give me a call.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
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The 30-Day Guarantee Gives You Confidence.

Published on by Al WooffittLeave a comment

When you make a purchase, you want to have confidence that the solution that you’ve spent money on is going to work. With many of the applications that we discuss with customers, the solutions are tried and tested. If your electrical panel is getting too hot, then an EXAIR Cabinet Cooler is exactly what you need. If there’s static on your assembly line, a Gen4 Static Elimination product is the way to go. And if you need to blow off excess water from an extruded pipe, a Super Air Wipe is the perfect fix.

There are plenty of situations where the solution isn’t clear-cut. We believe our products can make a difference, but with so many variables, it’s impossible to just plug everything into a formula and predict the exact outcome. The only way to know for sure is to test. That’s where EXAIR’s 30-day unconditional guarantee comes into play. Every one of our cataloged products is covered by this guarantee. Once you buy one of these items, you have a month to really test it out; change the angle, tweak the operating pressure, or swap out shims. If you manage to find the right setup to fix your issue, awesome! If not, we’ll gladly take it back and give you a full refund! The only thing you need to cover is the shipping to return it to us.

A great example of where testing is key is our Line Vacs. There are several factors to consider: the bulk density of the material, its size, whether it’s abrasive, the desired conveyance rate, and the distance for conveyance – both vertical and horizontal. By using the data we’ve gathered from our controlled in-house tests, we’re going to be able to give you a solid recommendation on which model will suit you best. However, to truly understand how our Line Vac will perform with your specific material and operational conditions, it needs to be put through its paces at your facility. When you buy from us, you get 30 days to try it out risk-free.

At EXAIR, we want to ensure you are getting the best possible solution. Our 30-day unconditional guarantee is one way that we make that a reality. If you would like to discuss how our products can help with your application, give us a call!

Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer

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Banner Image by Bruno from Pixabay