Sandblasting Fun

One of the current projects I am working on involves sandblasting. I had originally planned to job the task out, but for a variety of reasons, we made the decision to do it in house. Below are a few pictures from the project. The first is the set prior to being blasted. Since the set was being teched up prior to leaving the shop (or to go to paints) we decided to blast it in place so that the joints would match and it would fit back together in the same way.



Next we set up out pole and drape poles, and draped heavy plastic over to help contain the dust. We rented a sandblaster, and an air compressor that would run it and bought a ton of sand. Literally. (And bought more the next day). I am sure there is a formula to calculate how much sand to buy somewhere, someplace, but after this experience I would say that you can't buy enough sand! Even with over a ton we still recycled the sand through multiple times. The issue becomes, even in a cleaned environment, that the sawdust you remove with the blasting gets recycled into the dust. We used "Black Beauty" an iron slag to do the blasting. This produced a rougher texture than the sample our vendor provided, but was adequate to do the job we needed it to do.

For more information:

http://www.nstcenter.com/writeup.aspx?title=Abrasive+Blasting&page=TechResourcesAbrasiveBlasting.html

http://www.reedmin.com/black-beauty/

http://talbertpipes.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-to-read-your-sandblast.html