Compressors and Blasting

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi;

I am considering buying a Media Blasting Cabinet and know that my 2.5HP 50L SnapOn will not be up to the task of running this or most other shot blasting rigs.

Has anyone tried the Wolf Professional

And this is the cabinet

 

[brightspark]

that cabinets pretty crap and small .ok for carburettors and didly pieces that's about it the gun couldn't knock the skin of a rice pudding . if you can afford it buy a belt drive compressor a blast pot will soon kill a direct drive one

 

[julianf]

ive been getting into the idea of blasting again, so keep us updated on what you get up to?

 

[wristpin]

x2 for belt drive and a min of 15cfm

 

[frank horton]

bought my first and only blast cabinet for £50...it's on legs, has a light thats useless and it would get a small motorcycle engine in it...not that u would........

 

[carbon]

Have used one of those cabinets. Managed to get a 15” wheel in but was really awkward to use it as not a lot of space left inside

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Ah yes I remember being advised about Belt Drive Compressors before, the one I had previously been looking at is no longer available?
TBH looking at the cabinet again it does look small, with some steel sheet and box section I guess I could make up a much larger one for a lot less :-)

Any low cost Belt Drive Compressors that anyone can recommend?

 

[Water skier 16]

Clarke boxer 14/150 from Anglian pumping services. Cheaper than machine Mart and free Delivery too

 

[Wallace]

I've had one of those cabinets for years and used al-oxide, glass bead and J-Blast Superfine in it. With a few mods good results are achievable but without a decent quantity of filtered air don't expect speedy cleaning. A flow of vacuum through the cabinet is needed if you want to see what you are doing too and that also needs filtering, a bigger inlet filter will be needed too as the laughable one supplied will see the gloves popping off and the window bowing from a workshop vacuum. The sacrificial window sheets are stupidly expensive from Machine Mart so a substitute is worth finding. The gun in that photo looks like their cheaper syphon gun with supposedly hardened tips and is likely to be too big for your compressed air supply.

I bought another larger cabinet from Ebay and run both, one with J-Blast and the smaller with glass bead. Plenty of info and ideas out there to improve the cabinets for home use.

That Wolf compressor is direct drive and very noisy!

 

[henry Kadzielski]

Good morning to all. This subject has been thrashed to death over the years. Cheap / small, though it seems to be doable, eventually you will get p!!sed off with it. Can't see what you are doing, takes too long, no space to move bigger things around, or 'that will fit but can't get to all the bits'. Just yesterday a customer brought around a 'bike' frame, I thought it was a bicycle frame, turned out to be TRX Yamaha. I at least didn't think it would fit inside the cabinet, it did but was difficult to get to all the areas. What I am trying to say, get bigger as you will need it, space is a premium. On the other side speed is related to nozzle size and compressor capacity. I had a 15cfm compressor running a suction gun with garnet as an abrasive. Little nick knacks OK but even a small water pump housing painfully slow, not to mention the compressor not being able to keep up. As the pressure drops so does the grit speed and the cleaning capacity drops. I have upgraded my small suction cabinet with bigger air supply lines air pilot operated main air valve and bigger air nozzle, the cabinet now works OK. Still very dusty inside even with two 3" air inlets and a 4" dust extraction. Air is fed from a 70cfm rotary screw with refrigerated dryer. So if you are thinking a 15cfm compressor get two, parallel them together and life will be more tolerable. Even if you think 'I have time to do this' you will get p!!sed with how long it takes. These are very handy tools and become much more handy if speced correctly. Get the biggest cabinet you can, as you will need it eventually, my bigger cabinet is 1200mm wide 1200mm deep and 1200mm high and I regret not getting the 1500mm version now. Live and learn

 

[Wallace]

100% agree with Henry.