How to Refill an Aerosol Spray Can (Like Carb Cleaner, WD40, etc)

hey guys chrisfix here has this ever happened to you I want to go clean my carpets in my truck and this carpet cleaner is out of air it's completely full I could feel the liquid in here it's very heavy but it's completely out of air there's nothing coming out of here well I'm going to show you how to fill these aerosol cans with air because for some reasons sometimes the air empties and there's no more propellant now I don't know about you but I have a lot of different aerosol sprays and sometimes they just don't spray and sprays such as this mass airflow sensor cleaner are pretty expensive and it's just a shame to throw out a full or even half-full aerosol container just because you're out of propellant so to refill them all you need is an air compressor and one of these nozzles or one of these nozzles which fills the air in a tire ever gonna get a tire nozzle method you're gonna also need a valve stem before buying a valve stem go to your local tire place and ask them if they have any old ones plus a lot of times they'll give you an old one for free since they're just gonna throw them out anyway so if not it's only gonna cost like a dollar and it'll pay for itself the first time you refill a can so let's start up the compressor and fill the tank this will fill to about 140 psi and then shut off now that our compressors filled with air I have two containers here that are empty so I'm going to show you the two different methods that you could use depending on what equipment you have you can see the carpet cleaner is pretty much completely empty there's no air in it and then the choke cleaner has a little bit but it's not as strong as it should be that stream should be really strong so we're gonna fill both of these so these cans are filled with a certain psi of air and you can check the material safety data sheet the MSDS and a lot of times that'll tell you or just do a google search but typically these are filled from anywhere from 90 to 120 psi so to be safe when you do this yourself look it up each can might be different so on these cans they say 95 to 115 so I'm gonna fill it up at 95 so these gauges here this is our pressure in the tank and this is the pressure coming out of our hose so we want this to be around 90 to 95 so I'm just gonna pop this up and then turn it until this increases to about there right there is 90 I'll go a little bit more and that's 95 and then you just push this down to set it and we're ready to go now anything that comes out of here is gonna be 95 psi now with our container here all you have to do is take the lid off and then these come off just by pulling them straight out if you can't get them with your fingers you could use a pliers but this comes off pretty easy and then you have this nozzle here which normally gets pressed down you can see it goes down like that and it has a hole in it and that hole is where you're gonna fill it so in this case we're using this nozzle that has a hole in it and we're going to just push it right on top we're gonna line it up and then push down as we add air before we do that though always make sure you're using some type of safety glasses because we're dealing with pressurized air and stuff could shoot out at your eyes so I have my safety glasses on I have this somewhere that I could push down and hold it safely and have my hands right here where I could get this pressure on here I'm going to push down [Music] now I'm gonna add air just like that there we go so now I could spray down my carpets like I was planning on doing and you just saved yourself five to ten dollars depending on how much these cans cost and this one is full like this is completely full so the seal must have went bad it musta leaked and now we have plenty of compressed air I mean I could just keep going I don't want to saturate my carpets here but you get the idea so that's using this method of compressed air most people with compressors have one of these nozzles it's just a normal spray nozzle for dusting off an area or whatever you use it for the nozzle fits very well on these spray cap nozzles if it's right on top again it could get a little messy that's why I use your glasses you can even wrap this with a paper towel if you want but you just hold it on there straight you fill it up boom done alright so that was the method using this nozzle now let's use the tire gauge the tire filler switch these out all you have to do pull the top off just pull straight up again same style all these aerosol cans have the same style top so here's a valve stem this is what we want to turn it into you can see I cut mine just a little bit because we want to be able to get that little copper piece in there to push down on this stem right here so right on the edge it's gonna be hard to show but right on the edge there is that copper piece and we're gonna get the push down right on the edge so that this gets forced downwards and when that's forced downwards you can see it ready it's coming out because there is some pressure in here when that's forced downwards it allows the air to get pushed in so we could fill it now to cut the valve stem so it goes from this to this you could use one of these cutters if you don't have a power tool what I'm going to use is I'm going to use a dremel with a cutting wheel on it when you're doing this the key is to try to keep this as flat as possible so you make a good seal on this piece right here as always use your safety goggles watch your fingers we're just going to cut right in here I'm going to speed this up now cut this away [Music] now you can see me taking the valve stem and putting at the top of this disk and just holding it here and what that's doing is that's sanding the bottom so it's nice and flat you can see we got that nice and flat and that's going to make a great seal right against the container right here that's how you turn a brand new or used valve stem into one of those filler valve stems for these aerosol containers now I'm going to show you how we're going to fill this up with air what you're gonna have to do is inside this valve stem you want to press down on this in here it's already watch this I'm on the edge here so I could actually press down and you see liquids actually coming out now so that's what I want I'm gonna push down and as I'm pushing down have this connected inject air okay let's fill this up again 95 psi I'm just going to push down then I'm going to squeeze this good just a couple seconds of that get the nozzle back on let's go try this out and look how strong that is now that's the way it's supposed to be I'm not gonna waste it but you get the idea when you're cleaning your car about you want pressure and before it was just like a little it was like that but now it's nice and strong so these are two methods that used to fill up these aerosol containers one just the normal spray nozzle that shoots air out and the other is the valve stem method both methods work it works on most of these aerosol containers you choose which one you liked better or which one you have the tools to do and then now you could actually use this stuff instead of throwing it out and letting it go to waste hopefully this video was helpful if it was remember to give it a thumbs up also if you're not subscribed or what are you waiting for hit that subscribe button

Channel: ChrisFix

Views: 3,199,643

Rating: 4.8282256 out of 5

Keywords: how to fill an aerosol spray can, refill, wd40, spray can, fill a spray can, recharge an aerosol spray can, refill aerosol spray can, refill aerosol can, refill flat aerosol spray cans, Aerosol Spray (Invention), refill spray paint can, Make a Refillable Aerosol Spray Paint Can, Refill flat AEROSOL Spray Cans like the WD-40 and others

Id: InXaSfYqUeI

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/lmfoley79]

Hmm....buy a new can or risk an embolism? I choose new can. Either that or make a dedicated adapter that lets me not put my fingers right next to a small nozzle supplying 90+psi