One of the desires for the Goose is to go beach camping. A long time ago, in a previous life, we used to live on an island. In fact, the part of the island we lived on was also an island connected by a thin stretch of beach. There was a small ferry boat that could handle 4 cars at a time that was the main method of egress. If the ferry wasn’t running we could opt to traverse the beach. Never a problem, but always an adventure. For those who have never driven on a beach, there are two major rules to follow. 1) Stay in the tracks of those before you and 2) Air down your tires. Number Two is the most important. Without airing down tires, even the best of the best four wheel drives will be challenged. While some may be able to make it work, there will be lasting damage done to the drive train if the tires are not deflated.
There is an obvious issue that one runs into when airing down for any reason. When you are done, the asphalt is brutal on soft tires and you never know how far the nearest air station will be. Throw a camper on top and there’s no telling what will happen. So, before we entertain the idea of beach travels, we’ve been researching airing up options.
After much research, we had narrowed down our choices to a couple of options, but thought a friend may have some additional input. Low and behold, after a quick discussion it turned out our dear friend had an Arb twin cylinder air compressor along with wiring harness looking for a home. So our decision was made and Arb it would be. Here is the unit that arrived several days later.
That was the first part of the puzzle. The next hurdle…where to put it. Now, with the Ram, you’d think there would be some available real estate inside the massive engine box. Ha! Not an iota to space. So over to the interwebs search tools to see if anyone else had done this. Bingo…..
https://www.cumminsforum.com/forum/2013-2018-general-discussion/2135482-arb-ckmta12-twin-air-compressor-mounting-location.html
We really hadn’t used the floor compartments for much, so this was a perfect solution. Not to mention the idea of mounting to the underside of the chasis seemed a bit daunting.
Here is the Ram floor storage box. There is one behind both front seats.
After many dry fits and trials, the end game started to come into focus. One difference between the posters installation and ours is we mounted it with the electronic connections up and the air intakes down. The caveat is that we bolted the unit 3/4″ off the bottom of the box. The reason for this was we didn’t like the idea of the unit sitting on its connections and if they were down, they would be very difficult to access. Here is the Arb bolted into the Ram floor storage box.
Once that was figured out, we put two 3/4″ holes in the rear of the box, toward the top. One for the air hose and one for wiring. At one point, we had a rubber leader hose coming off the pump, but thinking about how hot other compressors get and experiencing several popped hoses due to excessive heat, we switched to a 24″ metal braided leader hose. We don’t have pictures for this, but the leader hose exit the floor storage box and goes directly up through a conveniently located access hole under the rear seat (thank you Dodge) which then comes through the carpet to the bracket and fitting shown below.
The Arb kit also came with a cabin switch. Thankfully, the Ram dashboard had a nice square plate just above the Ebrake release that had enough real estate to house the toggle without much effort. As for the wiring harnesses (two of them), the only modifications we had to do was lengthen the power and ground wires in the main harness. This was done by making a 10′ harness with 10awg wire and patching it in to the existing harness.
We haven’t done much testing yet but like what we’ve seen so far. The unit has a cutoff that shuts the compressor off at ~150psi. There is a fan that runs to help keep the unit cool (more likely to dissipate heat vs keeping cool). We do keep the compartment open while it is running to improve air flow (and help with heat). We’ll do some low to high inflation testing in the near future and update the post.
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