Proper care of faber tanks

[mark00020]

I have a pair of faber HP100s and I would like to know how concerned I should be about the exterior finish. I always rinse them, but diving in new england and all the rock climbing that is involved means they get scratched from time to time. The hydro stamp that was painted over with silver paint (I assume cold galvanizing paint) has a little dark spot in it too.
So, should I worry about every break in the paint surface? If I see bare metal, do I really have to clean it to SSPC-SP10 (which would probably be impossible for me to do without my own bead blasting booth) before I paint it with cold galvanizing paint?

Please don't turn this into a discussion about the merits of hot dip galvanized cylinders... if you want to buy me some of those I'll take them but I got these at an extremely good price and price is my limiting factor, I'm a Marine putting myself though college.

 

[tflaris]

Look for obvious signs of rust and treat as needed. In Florida cave country we call that cave sexy when you get them all scarred up from diving so much and dragging them in and out of your vehicle and to the dive site.

Safe diving

 

[JDMerk]

With my fabers I make sure that every time I dive them in salt water I dunk them in the rinse bin and shoot fresh water up the hole in the bottom of the boot...it flushes the salt up and out the top of the boot.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

Boots are the infamous killers of Faber tanks. I recently bought two well used O2 bottles from a retiring tech diver, both looked fine until you took the boots off, which is why the previous diver he sold them to returned them. Both were covered in rust over the entire area under the boot, including the older Faber that had been galvanized way back when they sold them in a plain galvanized finish or with paint over the galvanized finish.

But the rust was very fortunately just surface rust with no significant pitting after all the surface rust was removed. I had both tanks hydro tested and they passed just fine and with some feathering of the bare metal to paint interface and a fresh coat of paint all over they look and will function fine.

The moral of the story being that Faber tanks are superb but the fairly tight non draining boots they use are really bad news. If you have to have a boot, get one of the plastic self draining boots to put on it.

The paint itself holds up very well to abuse and all I'd worry about is perhaps applying a rust converter or paint with high zinc content and then some touch up paint over any dings to bare metal that you acquire.

 

[mark00020]

Thanks for that, I'll pull the boots off and see how I like it with them off.