blasting cabinets

[arkansawyer]

I'm looking for a cabinet large enough to put a motorcycle wheel into. Price and quality are important.
Does anybody have any advice/experience?
This is where my xs project has stalled. I need to blast and paint a lot of 30 year old stuff.

[slide]

Go to an autobody shop and get a windshield crate. Cut a large square out of the front and cover it with clear plastic with a small slit in the center. The plastic will allow you to see exactly what you are blasting. Place the wheel in the crate, stick your leather glove thru the slit and start blasting. During the winter, I used this method when making sand blasted signs for all the cottage owners ($$$$$). It works really well inside a garage being it eliminates sand blowing all over the place and the bonus is that you recover the sand. If you are not conserned with saving the blast material, I suggest you take the blaster outside (only if it's not too humid) and let her rip. If you are using silica sand, I would still suggest a respirator as that stuff is deadly.

[mental]

Here's a pretty good thread on another forum about building your own cabinet.

finishingforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=55

One bit of advise if you decide to build your own. Be sure that you add a vacuum system to it. It's healthier for you, keeps the shop cleaner and makes it much easier to see what your doing inside the cabinet. On my cabinet, I use the cheapest shop vacs that I can find. The reason for using the cheap ones is that the fine particles created by the blasting will kill the shop vac so there's no sense in using an exspensive one. How long they will last will depend on how much you use it. Also, I would use glass for the window. Find yourself some clear acetate (really thin plastic sheet) that you can cut to the size of the window. Place thin, double sided tape around the perimeter of the glass and attatch the acetate to the glass. This will protect the glass from being etched. When the acetate gets too etched to see well, just replace it with a fresh sheet. Some sandblasting suppliers sell these sheets with the tape already applied if you want to go that route, but then your glass would have to be the same dimensions as the suppliers, but that's no biggy.

I alway's thought that it would be a neat feature on a sandblasting cabinet, to make the material hopper removable so that you could take it out in the back yard and use it on stuff that is too big to fit into the cabinet. If I had built my own, that's what I would have done.

One like this from Harbor Freight would work really well for that.

www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/Displayitem.taf?itemnumber=9588

It's cheap enough and looks like it's the same size as a 5 gallon bucket. That means that you could use another 5 gallon bucket to make the coupler out of. You could make some kind of fancy seal to keep the material in or just wrap it up in racer (duct) tape.

Mental

[arkansawyer]

Thanks Mental.
I've been looking at northerntools.com. I've bought stuff from them in the past and it has arrived quickly and been useable.
It looks like I'll be spending $300 from the various websites and catalogs I've looked at.

[arkansawyer]

I found a brand new but damaged cabinet locally for $60. Central Pnuematics part #39170. Harbro Freight gets $279 for it. It's large enough to get a 19" wheel into. I screwed it together today.
Looks like the XS project is about to get started again. Wheels, calipers, fork legs, carbs, the engine. It all looks pretty diseased right now. It won't in a little while.

[lilbill]

where you at arkansawyer ? i'm in sunny downtown hot springs

[arkansawyer]

Spent a couple hours today cleaning some old 650 parts in the new cabinet. It was very relaxing. This is the way to do it. The real cat's a$$.