scsmith
Well Known Member
Potentially a VERY good idea!
This is a really good idea, actually. Hellium sniffers are really expensive, but not out of the question for a shop to acquire to do QC on a lot of tanks. The good ones are ball-park $20K. But small hand-held ones for leak checking are about $4K.
So, if Van's really wants to do some quality assurance on QB tanks when they come in, before shipping to customers, they could buy one of the $4K sniffers and leak-check every QB tank. Also, slow-build builders could send their completed tanks in to get tested for a fee.
Now, helium is pretty hard to keep in a tank. It may be that all our tanks would ooze helium. But presumably, it would be a matter of degree, and testing a few would establish a threshold where it is OK vs. one that would leak fuel vapor. It may also be that with some experimentation, a different gas (you can buy sniffers for O2, N2, CO, CO2, variety of others) could be found that would be a more realistic leak rate that would provide a good go/no-go test.
One might argue that it would be more straightforward to train the QB builders to make them better in the first place, but in 3 years, we haven't seen any evidence of that.
Perhaps some vendor testing of some tanks that have been in service and got blisters, and not, would go a ways toward convincing Van's that there is more of a problem that needs addressing? We would need to find a vendor, and arrange for some good samples to test as an experiment.
... they would call in an outside vendor to do a "Helium leak test". Those tiny molecules can pretty much find any opening.
Erik
This is a really good idea, actually. Hellium sniffers are really expensive, but not out of the question for a shop to acquire to do QC on a lot of tanks. The good ones are ball-park $20K. But small hand-held ones for leak checking are about $4K.
So, if Van's really wants to do some quality assurance on QB tanks when they come in, before shipping to customers, they could buy one of the $4K sniffers and leak-check every QB tank. Also, slow-build builders could send their completed tanks in to get tested for a fee.
Now, helium is pretty hard to keep in a tank. It may be that all our tanks would ooze helium. But presumably, it would be a matter of degree, and testing a few would establish a threshold where it is OK vs. one that would leak fuel vapor. It may also be that with some experimentation, a different gas (you can buy sniffers for O2, N2, CO, CO2, variety of others) could be found that would be a more realistic leak rate that would provide a good go/no-go test.
One might argue that it would be more straightforward to train the QB builders to make them better in the first place, but in 3 years, we haven't seen any evidence of that.
Perhaps some vendor testing of some tanks that have been in service and got blisters, and not, would go a ways toward convincing Van's that there is more of a problem that needs addressing? We would need to find a vendor, and arrange for some good samples to test as an experiment.