Duct Tape Man
Well-known member
Well, the boss has had it with the setup we've been scraping by with up till this point, and told me to chuck the existing mess in the garbage. We've been running a homebuilt 55-gallon drum made into a bead-blasting cabinet, powered by a Craftsman 60-gallon air compressor. The compressor gave up the ghost, and he's using it as an excuse to can everything and start over with something more along the lines of what we need to operate. The drawbacks of the old system were:
- barely enough power to operate, it would have a few seconds of powerful blasts but you'd have to stop for a few seconds to allow it to power back up again
- the 55-gallon drum of a blasting cabinet had only a small amount of space in it, so we could only use it for smaller parts. The lighting inside was bad, and the beads wouldn't drain to the drain port well and you'd often have to take the rubber glove and manually move the piles of beads to the center for draining into the system again
- no filtration of the beads and associated dust, the work area inside the tank would often be so bad you couldn't see the work, and we'd have to change the beads often
We have the money to replace this mess with a new unit, and we want to do it right. We need a good recommendation for a combination of a bead blasting cabinet (purpose built, not another drum), a suitable compressor, and a vacuum bead/air filtration unit to remove dust and debris from the bead stream. Unit must be powerful enough to be used in a production environment, with up to 100% duty cycle (entire 8-hour shift) with the trigger down and no loss of air pressure. Pressure must be adjustable on the cabinet side, so we can pressure down and do softer metals like aluminum and brass as well. Big interior work area so we can get bigger parts in there. Nice big viewing window too.
Any help from you gents in a recommendation is appreciated.
- barely enough power to operate, it would have a few seconds of powerful blasts but you'd have to stop for a few seconds to allow it to power back up again
- the 55-gallon drum of a blasting cabinet had only a small amount of space in it, so we could only use it for smaller parts. The lighting inside was bad, and the beads wouldn't drain to the drain port well and you'd often have to take the rubber glove and manually move the piles of beads to the center for draining into the system again
- no filtration of the beads and associated dust, the work area inside the tank would often be so bad you couldn't see the work, and we'd have to change the beads often
We have the money to replace this mess with a new unit, and we want to do it right. We need a good recommendation for a combination of a bead blasting cabinet (purpose built, not another drum), a suitable compressor, and a vacuum bead/air filtration unit to remove dust and debris from the bead stream. Unit must be powerful enough to be used in a production environment, with up to 100% duty cycle (entire 8-hour shift) with the trigger down and no loss of air pressure. Pressure must be adjustable on the cabinet side, so we can pressure down and do softer metals like aluminum and brass as well. Big interior work area so we can get bigger parts in there. Nice big viewing window too.
Any help from you gents in a recommendation is appreciated.
