Scuba Tank

I suspect that Jamie has already heard this one but sucba instructor told me that you should never paint your scuba tanks. The reason given was that folks who do custom paint jobs on metal objects like to bake them to cure the paint. Exposing an aluminum tank to this treatment makes it more brittle and thus likely to explode even under the stress of filling it to a normal pressue level.

Thus, I'm told, most dive shops won't even fill your tank if it has some fancy paint job for fear of the tank exploding (not just rupturing but exploding) because it had been in a comercial paint kiln.

I would like to know if anyone has ever tested this. How much heat is too much? Does it matter how quickly it cools? Probably the safest way to test it would be to have a paint shop bake a tank and then fill it with water and apply pressure. Even though the water-filled tank will not explode violently like one filled with air, I would still do it in a sturdy tank full of water and some protection around it.

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