After an 8 week saga, the shop compressor has finally been completely fixed. Most of you probably didn’t realize the fix had still not been completed, because about 2-3 weeks ago Danny rigged up a temporary bypass of the problem sensor. And for about 10 days before that, I had kept the compressed air system functional with a set of backup compressors, but those required frequent care-taking to keep them going. But yesterday I finally replaced the suspect sensor, and everything appears to be functioning normally again.
Huge shoutout to @dannym for all the work he did in diagnosing and fixing the problem. He also fixed two significant issues with the compressor’s air dryer. Without him, we would have had to bring in outside expertise to repair this, likely at considerable cost.
I want to emphasize how lucky we are to have this compressor running our shop air. It is a hosted machine, owned by Danny. Despite these minor problems, it is a very robust system made by one of the best industrial air compressor manufacturers in the world. A similar used replacement would probably cost $8K, a new equivalent would be over $15K.
That said, this incident has made clear how dependent we have become on reliable compressed air in the shop. This is normal as a shop grows. So I am working on making sure we always have backup options immediately available in the future.