Dustless blaster conversion?

[Travis31415]

I've seen dustless blasters online, but they are prohibitively expensive. The theory is simple, but there are obviously internal differences between wet and dry blasters.

I have a 100lb pressurized blaster that isn't used anymore and I'd be interested in converting it. Has anyone successfully converted a dry blaster to a wet blaster? If so, could you share your designs? I have no problem fabricating necessary parts or welding a pressure vessel.

Thanks

 

[Flail]

I bought a pressure washer sand blasting attachment from northern hydraulics (can’t find it there anymore but google it) that was designed to **** out of a pile of sand. I didn’t like the efficiency of it so jerry rigged my sand blaster to gravity feed the supply hose and it worked fine. Used it to sand blast a few cars. You will get wet and it’s a hot summer day sort of thing. Benefits are no dust. Down side is you will need metal prep (phosphoric acid) as you will get flash rust.

 

[rpcraft]

You can check on youtube at this fellows channel and he actually makes some interesting wet blast cabinets.

One out of a dishwasher and another out of the HF media blast cabinet that you usually see for around 180 USD. I think the parts vary and come out to be about a 1000 dollars according to two other common youtube builds and personally it looks like it would be a huge pain in the **** to not only source the items but assemble and make that cabinet relatively water tight to make it into an efficient vapor blast cabinet. It's still a great deal cheaper than buying a premanufactured unit though when you do the math.

I think it takes a much different setup to convert a blast pot. I think the smaller units use a siphon tube and for the dustless blasting type units its more like a suction style feed. Either way you usually have to have a high CFM and relatively high psi compressor. The bigger the pot the more CFM and air pressure you need (think like an air operated jack hammer compressor for reference). The siphon pressure washer based units usually need to be using a Pressure washer that can push more than 3.5 gallons per minute, and that is a pretty heavy duty pressure washer comparatively speaking and it takes a lot of time and waste material to get any progress done from the looks of it.