Retractable Air Hose
The Convenience of a Retractable Air Hose
Before the advent of the retractable air hose, garages and shops that operate several air compressors for their various pneumatic tools used to have a floor covered with intersecting and sometimes intertwining flexible tubes. Thanks to the wheel-like reels around which the tubes are either automatically or manually wound, working areas are no longer a chaos of greasy and dirty snakes crawling all over the place.
Reels that automatically pull in the flexible tubes are equipped with a set of springs and cogged gears that allow a user to draw out the tube and lock it at a certain length. By tugging at the tube slightly, the cogs are unlocked allowing the spring to wind the tube back into the reel.
There are also less expensive models that lack the self-winding mechanism. In its place is a lever which can be used to crank the wheel to take the tube back into the reel. These models are often found in homes and the smaller commercial garages and shops.
Since a retractable air hose is only out of its reel when in actual use, it is often cleaner than the kind that is exposed more often. Further, there is also lesser possibility of its being accidentally cut, abraded, or lacerated.