It’s common to find homemade air-hose splitters on job sites, usually a brick of brass fittings cobbled together on a Monday morning so that the last guy to show up has a place to plug in his nailer. So my first impression of the DeWalt D55040 Quadraport was that I already have one of these. “Made it myself, in fact,” I thought proudly. If my homemade version is the bride of Frankenstein, though, then the DeWalt version is more like Megan Fox.

The 3⁄8-in. inlet on this splitter allows you to run a 1⁄2-in.-dia. air hose from your compressor to the splitter. This means less restriction of airflow and less chance of a drop in pressure between the compressor and your nailers. Fed from the inlet hose are four 1⁄4-in. quick-connect couplers. The first two feed the lines to your nailers at whatever pressure you have dialed in at the compressor. The second two are controlled by the splitter’s onboard regulator, which is observed via a high-quality liquid-filled gauge.

What makes this rig better than a homemade version? For one thing, the fittings, the regulator, and the gauge are protected by a tough plastic cage. That means there’s less chance that you’ll be replacing fittings every time someone stomps on the box or sets the leg of a stepladder on top of it. The splitter even includes mounting holes so that it can be screwed to a wall that’s out of harm’s way but still close to the action. The quick-connect fittings supplied with the unit are also of high quality, and I never noticed any air leakage, even with hoses hanging off the splitter and being pulled at awkward angles. Last, the ability to run lines at different pressures means that a single compressor can feed 120-psi air to the framers on the second floor while also stepping down the pressure for the trim carpenters on the first floor.

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