Yep, tried them all. Best bet is to take that piece of crap back to HF and get your money back.
They load up at the bottom and you have to keep pulling it apart to get it unclogged. Then the guns wear out the rubber stop pad about every hour of blasting and the nozzles don’t last long at all either. .
Amateur equipment produces amateur results. Got stuck with one of their bench top sand blast cabinets also, another piece of crap. Leaks like a sieve, sand won’t drain back to the bottom, no light so you can’t see what your doing, plastic lens frosts up after a few minutes of blasting, ruined two vacuum cleaners, need I go on!
Last year on someone’s advice from the forum, I bought a Clarke 90# gravity feed abrasive blaster on wheels from TSC, it was pretty cheap so I thought I’d try it also. But, I’ve been so disgusted with the whole open-air sand blasting issue that I haven’t had a chance to make a mess with that siphon bucket.
I’m at the point that I’m convinced that, for the initial expense, the time involved and the mess that it makes of your yard, house and shop it just isn’t worth it for large items and I’ll probably bite the bullet and take any big blasting up to the sand blaster guy on the north side of town.
Since I sold my airplanes and a lot of my antique radio collection I’ve now scraped up enough moolah for a 48x36x36 blast cabinet from TP Tools. I plan to add the optional extension door for an additional 16” to the width and if they don’t make one for the other side I can fab one for that. That means I could get the axles in to blast, fenders and doors also. This one also comes with a real honest to god dedicated dust collector for all day cabinet blasting. At that point I will be able to do any thing up to a cab, box, hood or frame, which I’ll job out while I go out for breakfast. So that’s my take on this whole sand blast issue.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
