Bought A Sandblaster

speaking from experience don't recycle media in the long run I spent more time dealing with the clogs than it was worth.

 

Truckee roadhouse welcome. I did not use the glass bead. I used the coal slag from tracker supple 3060 1/8. I found the it was very good for removing rust, dirty and old paint. I got my hood fenders and other parts down to metal. My compressor is 11.9 CFM so it was pushing out the slag a lot. I had to quarter turn the bottom value and slowly open the feed value on the hose to get a flow or it would just all come out at once. Make sure you use it were you can recycle the slag with no moisture and run it through the filter that comes with the unit. I bought 6 bags over three days and on the 2nd day I got smart and recycled the slag. The slag work great for three to four times then I use a new bag. I would fill it up as much as you can and because I would do about 3 to 4 minutes of blasting.
Respiratory is a must! I used a 3m one all purpose. I hope this helps.

 

Some dusts are a danger. When young a neighbour had worked in a granit stone pavement mine.
He was a strong man of 40 and suddenly he started to become weak and meagre. Lung disease then he rapidly died.
I have read that these mines are closed in France now but production comes from...China.

 

no cabinet here, I will say clean dry air and media is a huge help.

 

Depending on what you are blasting, make your choice for media, I've used Black Diamond, sand, ground walnut shell, ground corn cob or soda. There are tons of articles on the 'net about media blasters, what media to use and mods to improve media blaster performance, including wet blasting. Good Luck!

 

Does anyone know if a pressure pot could be hooked up to my gravity fed system to increase the preassure since my air compressor is small? I'm new to blasting, so I'm not 100% clear how these things interact or if they can interact?

Thanks in advance.

 

Air volume is what blasting requires. If you have an air storage tank, even a smaller compressor can be made to work. At our old shop, we buried a 500 cuft pressure tank outside, and usually kept it at 160 psi. A 9 cfm compressor was used to maintain pressure. The volume of the tank was good for blasting jobs up to 1/2 hour. For bigger jobs, we'ed fire up two or three more larger compressors to feed the main air tank. Each compressor usually had it own storage tank too.
To IRQVET, There are either gravity/syphon feed, or pressure pots. Gravity feeds can do small projects, but they are not very efficient in cleaning as compared to a pressure pot. With a pressure pot, the whole media storage tank is pressureized to over 100 psi, and the media is metered though a valve at the bottom to regulate flow to the blasting tip.
A pressure pot is an easy project to build. Mine is simply made from an old Mack truck air starter tank, about 10" dia, and 30" tall. I have a 1" fill port on top a couple 1/4 turn ball valves in the side, and one more on the bottom. A goot ceramic nozzle is the only piece I had to outsource.
-Donny