portable sand blasting cabinet

I have been doing some horseshoe work with old shoes, I was useing a heavy wire wheel to clean, {Time consuming, and not all the crap would come off} I tryed moradic acid, {still time concuming cleaning up the crap that would not come off plus the fact it is acid}.

I was thinking about sandblasting with a portable cabinet from HF or Nothern tools. I also found some on Ebay for 135.00.

Are they or would they be worth it for this cleanup? I will be doing a lot of shoes for some personal projects and for sale down the road projects

Don D.

Reply to
pegleg
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For odd shapes, like your horseshoes, sandblasting is best. The cabinet is really the best for anything that will fit inside. The pressure pots or small hand held guns waste sand since it flies all over the place and is a mess to clean up.

Something to keep in mind. Pre-clean the item of loose material, soil, etc.. This prevents premature contamination of your blast media.

I strongly recommend purchasing sandblast media that it intended for sandblasting, not the "sand box" sand sold at HD. This stuff is silica sand and breaks down into hameful dist. Silica sand is not suppose to be used in commercial sandblasting because of the health effects and may be prohibited my state regulations.

I use alum. oxide or glass beads for fine work and copper slag ("Black Beauty") for course work. I also like to use crushed walnut shells but I recently tried some in my HF cabinet and it clogged up the pick up tube. Not sure why, but I suspect it has absorbed moisture over the couple years it sat in the shed.

The $135 for the the cabinet will just be the beginning. You will eventually want to install a dust collector. This will remove the dust from the cabinet and allow you to continue to use your blast media longer. The media will break down in a short period of time and eventually you will have to dump it and replace it with new. I don't like to just add new media to old since a lot of the old is just too small to be effective anymore.

My opinion FWIW.

Steve

Reply to
Steve

Sounds ideal for your purpose. HF has a benchtop unit of a good size, that runs less than $100 on sale.

Reply to
Rex B

The biggest hurdle with sandblasting is the compressor. Using a pressure pot reduces the air needed, but you'll still need a lot. Depends upon how you use it, of course, but it's real easy to get into situation where you're spending more time waiting for the compressor to catch up (recharge its tank) than sandblasting. I'll leave actual numbers to those with more experience, but it's definitely something that you want to think about before buying the cabinet, etc.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Engelhardt

Go to

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and get one of their blasting guns.

I have a HF cabinet with a TP gun as the original gun SUCKED! Night and day difference.

Bart D. Hull snipped-for-privacy@inficad.com Tempe, Arizona

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my Subaru Engine Conversion Check
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Tango II I'm building.

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pegleg wrote:

Reply to
Bart D. Hull

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