Re: Anyone else built their own sandblaster?
I don't use the "Play Sand" because I found it was full of crap (literally!). Cats seem to LOVE it. It wasn't the turds that worried me, they filtered out, it was the urine that might be in there. Any iron works in your area will know where to get good clean sand or media bagged for blasting. It isn't that expensive and the risk of blasting foreign crap into the steel isn't worth risking for a couple of dollars savings on the media. Don't forget that sand also "wears out" and looses its' cutting edge.
As for the EPA, no idea why they check who they do. I'm lucky. My old sand was clean with nothing but iron oxide, some alkaloid primer and some Nitrate dope residue. All acceptable waste products for them. The stuff they hate seems to be heavy metals like lead and Cad (even in tiny amounts).
My biggest pain with my system is I wear out the carbide tips too fast.
One really nice "goody" I designed was a long SS tube that screwed on the end of the gun with a hole in the side at the other end. Had a plug that went into the end of the tube held with a set screw. The plug had a 45 degree face cut into it so that the media came out sideways at the end through the hole. You stuck it down a steel tube (like a wing strut) and rotate the strut as you pull the blast tube slowly out cleaning the ID slick as you could ask for. You need to have a way to get the air and media out as you blast so both ends need to be open or you get a face full of sand.
Hank
I don't use the "Play Sand" because I found it was full of crap (literally!). Cats seem to LOVE it. It wasn't the turds that worried me, they filtered out, it was the urine that might be in there. Any iron works in your area will know where to get good clean sand or media bagged for blasting. It isn't that expensive and the risk of blasting foreign crap into the steel isn't worth risking for a couple of dollars savings on the media. Don't forget that sand also "wears out" and looses its' cutting edge.
As for the EPA, no idea why they check who they do. I'm lucky. My old sand was clean with nothing but iron oxide, some alkaloid primer and some Nitrate dope residue. All acceptable waste products for them. The stuff they hate seems to be heavy metals like lead and Cad (even in tiny amounts).
My biggest pain with my system is I wear out the carbide tips too fast.
One really nice "goody" I designed was a long SS tube that screwed on the end of the gun with a hole in the side at the other end. Had a plug that went into the end of the tube held with a set screw. The plug had a 45 degree face cut into it so that the media came out sideways at the end through the hole. You stuck it down a steel tube (like a wing strut) and rotate the strut as you pull the blast tube slowly out cleaning the ID slick as you could ask for. You need to have a way to get the air and media out as you blast so both ends need to be open or you get a face full of sand.
Hank
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