Blast It…

In these lazy days of early summer, things sometimes take a little longer than anticipated. Such as it was with the set up of my new blasting cabinet. I’d hoped to have it done last weekend, but things were delayed a bit…

I started the project with a blasting cabinet in a box:

…that over the course of a little more than a week turned into a blasting cabinet in a shop:

The road was not without its pitfalls though. I did buy the cabinet through Harbor Freight and the saying “you get what you pay for” does hold true. More on that later…

To start with, the cabinet needed to find a place to live. Even though the shop I own is larger than I would have ever dreamed of being able to have a few years ago, space is still at a premium with all of the parts for the Mustang still in storage. I decided to build a stand that would not only hold the blast cabinet but allow me to store other items beneath it.

Last week, my Brother-in-Law stopped by and we whipped up this in about an hour or so:

It’s set at just the right height so my short frame can see into the cabinet while I’m working. At that point, we decided we might as well fire up the compressor to see what we were able to do with my new toy. We started with an old rusty spade found buried in the I-haven’t-been-able-to-rid-myself-of-it-yet gardening section of my shop:

We loaded up the walnut media into the cabinet and went to town.

The result was… less than impressive:

The paint was taken off, but the rust stubbornly refused to budge. I had been hoping for more, but a review of the walnut blast media box seemed to confirm that I had been hoping for a little much out of the walnut:

Being a “soft abrasive,” the walnut didn’t have the power to cut away at the rust enough to make much of a difference.

Somewhat dejected, we decided to drain the hopper of the cabinet in preparation for getting a more aggressive media. That’s when we ran into the most significant “you get what you pay for” issue with the cabinet.

You would think that the drain for the media would be at the bottom of the cabinet. In this case though, it wasn’t. The drain was on the side of the cabinet’s media hamper:

This design meant that the media couldn’t drain directly out of the cabinet. Instead it needed to first travel horizontally out of the drain tube (not pictured) and then out. Gravity was not being taken advantage of nearly as well as it could have been.

In our case, the drain didn’t work at all with the walnut. The media steadfastly refused to exit the cabinet until I pushed it out with compressed air. I decided really quick that was not going to be my long term solution.

Over the weekend, I hacked up a new drain where gravity intended it to be:

After plugging the original hole and adding a custom stopper, I loaded up the cabinet with more walnut and tried to drain it again.

This time, with much more success:

Later that day, I tried using my walnut media in the little portable blaster I purchased at the same time as my compressor:

As it turned out, the walnut media was really too big for the nozzle that portable blaster is equipped with. The walnut would come out, but only briefly before the nozzle clogged and I’d have to stop and clean it.

Yeah, the walnut media was rather a failed experiment.

Earlier this week, I set out to find a different media that would work better. This ended up being a much more difficult task than I would have ever imagined it to be. No one seemed to sell blast media in my town. I realize I live in Podunksville, but it really shouldn’t have been this hard. Finally, on my sixth store I found someone who had one type of media that they could sell me:

It’s not really what I was looking for, but it was dirt cheap ($14.50 for a hundred pounds) and didn’t contain any dangerous silica so I decided to give it a shot.

I got it home and carefully loaded it into my blast cabinet and then found my test spade. I’m not ashamed to admit that pulling the trigger on the blasting gun brought a squeal of delight out of my lungs. It was like painting the rust off!

This is what I started with:

After maybe 5 minutes, I was left with this:

You can still see some of the pitted rust remains on the spade, but after not even trying very hard the vast majority of the rust was totally gone.

Delighted, I decided to try something else. I grabbed one of my old front turn signal assemblies:

And in only a couple of minutes I turned it into this:

I’m delighted with the results! My blast cabinet is now fully functional. I haven’t tried the new media yet in the portable blaster. I decided to wait on that until I could get some better safety equipment that’s more appropriate to blasting outside of a cabinet. I have high hopes though that the media will work there as well – allowing me to blast the lower dash much easier.

Even with just the blast cabinet working for now, I have the ability to start working on some of the rusty parts I need to restore while the Mustang is at the body shop. After a few weeks of shop-outfitting, I should be back to restoration this weekend.

Speaking of the Mustang, I talked to the folks at the body shop today. It should be heading off to get its own sandblasting treatment in the next couple of days. Hopefully, I’ll have some pictures in a week or two after it’s been stripped of its primer/paint.