Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Havin' a Blast


The next step in my experiment with currie temperature is the whole sandblasting aspect. I called all of the usual suspects to get things cleaned up and the best deal I could get was $100 and a 50 mile drive each way. Downhill with a tailwind the family truckster gets 20mpg so 200 miles and 8 hours of time to travel gave me a crazy thought.... Why not buy a sandblaster?

Craigslist and patience to the rescue. Within two days I found a local compressor for $100 that would do 7 cfm/minute @ 90psi which is on the bottom end of what you need so I snagged it. I immeditely dropped antother $30 at TSC for a blaster and some media. That got me close but it was tedious. A little more patience turned up a pressure pot for $50 and things were better. Airflow was still a bit low so I added in my other compressor to up the cfm/min by an additional 3 (every little bit helps) and things are working well.

Even though this is a work in progress, I'll leave you with a quick:

before


and after

2 comments:

  1. You have all the good toys. I'm gonna have to bring my rusty Tonka truck over.

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  2. Sandblasters rule. TIP tools sells nice blast cabinets, that's what I got years ago for car restoration stuff, it also work great for anything else that can fit through the cabinet door.

    Be sure to have a lot of water filtration (seperator) on the air line for the blaster, they use so much air the compressor runs all the time, putting a lot of water into the line, which just clogs the blast nozzle in short order.

    Walnut shells are a good media for removing paint and crud where you dont' want to actually etch the metal underneath.

    Fun stuff!
    -Ed

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