Technical Blast Cabinet Troubleshooting

Are you having trouble picking up the media ? I found the simplest method seems
to work the best. Sears has those small media pots that I did my whole car with.
I liked the simple media pickup and use it on my cabinet.
Rich

 

My siphon tube lays on the side/bottom of the blast cabinet. The pickup tube is submerged in the media and has a long slot cut into a piece of 1/2" emt conduit.

 

At work , I use a larger, industrial sized unit, and when someone comes to me and complains that the Sandblaster isn't working, It's always 2 things- the air filter is clogged (you probably don't have one), or they have put too much media in there. I have applied this to my home blaster, which I have just set up, and is similar to the small ones in the videos, & found that a couple of cups of media works fine. I have a bottom- feed gravity pick-up, and after about 1/2 hour of blasting, most of the media has worn out and been contaminated with ****, so it is changed out and a new handful put in.

 

I addressed the dust storm issue by mounting a suction fan on the outside of the cabinet, over the vent that is intended to be connected to a shop vac. Contact your local HVAC dealer and tell them you'd like to buy a couple of the draft inducer blowers from high efficiency furnaces they have removed. A lot of times these end up in their s****/recycling pile, so they will sell them pretty cheap. They have nylon impellers so last a long time in the dusty abrasive environment. I run the outlet of the blower through a section of dryer vent hose to the outside of the shop.

 

^^^My snap-on cabinet has a fan motor on the back and it pulls hard enough to inflate the exhaust bag which is 5 foot tall and a couple feet in Diameter, but man can that ****er kick up a cloud when it is running at peak performance.

I run gl*** beads, doesn't touch rust but it'll strip paint fast.

If you get water ever in your lines or in your tools, you need to fix that issue or you will never be happy with your blaster or a plasma cutter.

 

Here's an upgrade kit for the standard HF blast cabinet.
https://www.partswasherupgradekit.com/blast-cabinet-kit.html

 

Funny this should come up. I just upgraded my air compressor and plan on changing my gun to the higher cfm rating to see if that makes a difference. The new compressor is about 25cfms at 175 psi, so this should make a huge difference.