I have a (somewhat) relevant story. Feel free to skip past if you can't spare the time.
My first blast cabinet was a Harbor Freight model. Of course, I started hanging around here so I knew about all the upgrades and mods that were possible. At some point in the process of upgrading my setup, I sent an inquiry to Tacoma Company for their pricing sheet to price out one of their guns. To my surprise, I got a call back from Mike Tacoma himself.
He asked me what I was working on, and what my plans were etc. I was embarrassed to tell him I had a Harbor Freight cabinet I was upgrading and I must have made some kind of disparaging comment about it because he picked up on it. He proceeded to tell me about a time many years ago when they still made cabinets, and pretty good ones from the sound of it. Anyway, apparently he was at a trade show somewhere and into the show room rolled a truck and they started offloading these brand new shiny blast cabinets from China. He went and walked around one and looked it over and then he asked what they were priced at. Apparently, when he found out, he knew right then and there that there was no future in making blast cabinets in the US anymore and the company pivoted to focus on making upgrade kits for cabinets (including import cabinets.)
His point was that there is a lot you can improve about a blast setup (compressor, gun, valve, pedal, glass, hoses, etc) but there's not a whole lot to be improved abiut the cabinet itself.
Granted, i now have a Trinco, and my last cabinet was an Econoline, so I can appreciate how beefy the cabinets are and they sure do seem nicer than the flimsy HF cabinets, but at the end of the day, they both do the same thing and it can be hard to justify the substantial increase in cost for a high end cabinet when you could spend less on some key upgrades and have a setup that outperforms the Trinco ETC. as it comes from the factory.
