The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop Sand Blaster

Can you recommend a good portable sand blaster. I bought one from Sears, but I'm taking it back. It seemed to work for the 1st 20 lbs of sand, then nothing.

Thanks
Mike

Eastwood company has several models all good,depends on the size of your compressor CFMs . I bought a small pressure pot for 80 bucks a year ago it hold about 90 lb of sand I found that the best combination was either a 3/32 or 1/8 nozzle using a fine sand grade 30/20 I have used a 5/32 with course sand works OK. My compressor is small it takes forever. I sure don't have to worry about warping the 16 guage metal on my 52 1/2 as I'm around 70PSI most of the time. I've been almost a year blasting 4 or 5 hours per month still quite a bit to go. Northern has pressure pot for a resonable price #155341-1413 change to good dead man valve they have most of the nozzles you need. But the large dead man valve Item no# 22007 in eastwoods catalog then buy the nozzles to go with it (Northern has em). I made a sand strainer out of, screen door screen ty-wraped over the top of a five gallan plastic bucket with a hole on the side of the bucket so you can pour your recycled sand into the pressure pot. Its dirty messy time consuming but you come out with nice clean metal.

Keep trying or check the Sears model out. Maybe something's not set up right. I've got the same (black plastic with hose out the bottom) sold thru Northern. It works fine. I may in the end just have someone else do the work for me, as it makes a real mess. I made a cabinet to contain things which helps a lot, but it is still ugly work.

The Sears blaster's gun is a piece of junk. I bet if you take the nozzle apart you will see the sand has worn through it. Same thing happened to me. I am surprised you were able to use it for 20 pounds of sand. Get a better gun, but then that means you paid about $50 for a plastic container. Also, if you are going to do major amounts of blasting, I suggest getting carbide nozzle for the gun. Also expensive.

I have found the same thing with the syphon feed type sand blasters, the pickup tube clogs up a lot, have cleaned out the burrs inside the gun giving better suction, made sure the sand is really dry (even plugged up with glass beads. have even used an extra air line mounted close to the pickup tube to stop some of the clogging problems, but now i use the little one for small parts only. I have a pressure feed unit that hold 150lbs of sand and have used up to a 1/4 tip on it running 90lbs in the tank, but am using a diesel air compressor ment for running jackhammers with 210CFM air quanity is not an issue. I blasted the frame and supension parts over two days and painted using over 1000lbs of sand, backyard looked like a beach

The 90 pound pressure blaster I got from Harbor Freight or Northern, don't remember which, they both have the same model,works very well. The only thing I don't like about it is the small sand fill opening. Seems to take forever to fill it with a bag of sand.

If I was going to buy another I would get one with a large sand fill opening.

I have a San-blast portable blaster works great. I use Black Beauty works wonders over sand, I think it's about $6-8 a bag. San-blast has closed up (2002) try www.brutmfg.com GOOD air compressor is a must, 1/2" hose, at least 100# capacity, or you will be filling it a lot when doing a large job. Zeke

I am building a pressure type sand blaster. I have a large pressure vessel and all of the plumbing except for the gun/nozzel. Where would be a good place to find this final piece? How much should I plan on spending?

Phil

I picked up the nozzel & sand blast hose from www.Princessauto.com, and various ceramic nozzels with the deadman type grip.