Tame Your Air Hose

Make it much easier to control a lightweight airtool by adapting your flexible hose.

Materials required:-
Paracord
Cable ties

Using a lightweight air-tool like an upholstery stapler requires some delicacy. The weight and inflexibility of a standard air hose puts torsion onto the tool and makes fine control hard.

Small-bore recoil hoses are available which are much more flexible, but their very flexibility means that the hose ends up coiled on the floor and snagging on things which in turns makes control of the tool hard.

I tied a piece of paracord to each end fitting, running up the inside of the coil.

This helped on the kinking, but the hose still sagged to the floor and snagged on things.

I used small cable ties to pinch the paracord to the hose every few turns. This makes the hose much less likely to snag on obstructions and much more predictable in its behaviour, which in turn make it less likely to interfere with the use of the tool.

I made this a while ago, but SAPICKFORD published first in a different category. If I can't hyperlink, then please search Instructables for "Tension Management for Oxygen Tubing". That design used 3-D printing to make clips for the hose, connected with elastic, which is a much more elegant solution.