So, over the weekend I bodged together my media cabinet set-up and my pressured sandblasting pot. The basic idea is that the siphon feed is good for most things, but items stuch as brake drums need more heavy duty power.
Well, the initial results are a positive failure. Positive meaning I did get some good results, failure meaning it all went wrong very quickly....
So, what I found is the following:
1) My shop-vac air cleaning set-up simply couldn't keep up at full blast. There were times when I couldn't tell if I was blasting the drum or the side of the cabinet. Perhaps with a frech filter it may work better. It held it's own until the pot output became uncontrollable.
2) The craptastick nozzle set up that comes with the pressure pot failed very quickly. It would either be full bore or nothing. There was no inbetween. When I still had control I could dial it down to a controllable level. After that, it was a sandstorm in a box.
3) Media recovery is a chore. So, in a siphon setup you just reuse the existing media until it's too used up, remove it and replace it. With a pressurized system the media is all in the pressure pot and it gets dumped into the cabinet. Well, the cabinet isn't well designed for a free flow out the bottom, so everything has to be scooped out, screened for oversize debris, and then loaded back into the pressure pot. This is highly inefficient, especially when you can't control how fast you use the media.
Now, all this being said. There's some finer points to be thought through. If I can:
A) Find a better sandblast "gun" that works with a pressurized system I can control flow better.
B) Either a clean air filter, bigger shop vac, or a dust collector may be able to keep the field of vision clear.
C) Some modifications to my cabinet and it's stand may better allow for media to drain out the bottom, be filtered and returned to the pressure pot.
For tonight, I'll use the old siphon feed to finish off the brake drum. But I've got more mods in mind for this kit. And, I'm also thinking about what it would take to build my own cabinet, just because I'm anal-retentive that way.
Cheers!
Jody
