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Thanks to everyone who responded to my O2 query. I'd actually checked into aviator's O2 a year or two back, and the price I got was much higher than for med or welding. I didn't look further as the dealer was giving me a good price on med (my situation is complicated by the fact that I own a couple "K' tanks and some dealers won't touch privately owned tanks). After getting reading the responses to my post, I got back to the dealer and found the real story was they didn't "do" aviators themselves and had actually quoted me based on them having to get it from another dealer which really ran up the price (at the time they gave me the bullshit line that the reason was that the sales of aviator's were so small that the price was much higher). We've got two new gas suppliers servicing my area since I last checked prices; I called them and found I can get aviators for much less (though still a tad more than med).There doesn't seem to be any pattern or logic to the prices of the different grades. One suppliers sells aviators for just a couple dollars more than welding or med, the other for about 20% more, and the other for double! Prices for a single K (250cf) tank of med or welding O2 ranged from $22 to $37 and a 337cf of aviators for $37 to $40. I think the reason for this is that these places are really set up to sell big quantities to volume users, and when you walk in to fill a single tank, or just five or ten a year, they just pull the price out of hat. It pays to check around. Incidently, having used both med and welding, both diving and flying, I gotta say I don't think I hold with the acetylene theory. The thing is, anything that can do you harm in the O2 can do an equal amount of damage at the plant. Acetylene spontaneously explodes at a pretty low pressure - there's no way it's going hang around in the bottom of an O2 tank, and if there is any chance of it, no way the supplier is going to take a chance and pump O2 on top of it. We had an old style carbide acetylene generator spontaneously blow when someone used the wrong torch with it and the O2 backed up into it - awesome!
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