Catching up on posts. A few months back my son and i were gonna head out camping. The usual pick him up from school on Friday and head out for the weekend. I load up the Panda and get ready to go pick up my son, crank her up, throw her in reverse and head a loud pop. Oh hell…. What the heck is that. Immediately I get the suspension fault normal mode message on my dash. I jump out and take a look at where the compressor is located and see a bunch of desecant beads rolling around my driveway.
Screw it… where we’re going we don’t need EAS. Had to go pick up my son. We drove straight to the camp spot.
after we get home Sunday i pulled the compressor to find this.


Luckily I have spares. Anybody have one blow out like this before?

 

Odd... was that an OEM dryer? Aftermarket ones are produced. Operating pressure is over 200psi, approaching nearly 250psi in fact. So any small defect can cause a catastrophic failure. One may want to assume it was an over-pressure situation but besides the ECU monitoring pressure there is a mechanical failsafe in the exhaust port. So I am putting a bed on defective dryer, some sorta stress/abuse/etc. Maybe even some sorta odd solvent damaged whatever glue they used to bond the dryer together. But to answer, no I have never seen that type of failure before.

 

I have seen that once before, not sure of the exact reason but an excessive build up of pressure.

 

You’re probably right. I believe this was a dryer from Amazon. Lasted about 8 months. I replaced it with a Land Rover dryer I got off a compressor from the pull-a-part. I have a couple compressors I got at the pull-a-part. Always good to have spare compressors. I rebuilt all of them so I can just swap them out if one goes bad. I get my rebuild parts from 4x4airseals out of the U.K. Highly recommend.