Very Basic Blasting Cabinet Set Up

[mcman56]

I bought a used blasting cabinet, the cheapest HF cabinet, and I have a 3hp compressor so it is about as basic as it can get. It came with some kind of media so I thought I would give it a try. It is not sand so I'm guessing glass beads or could it even be soda. It got wet at some time so there was some caking which I tried to break up. The blaster is not working. I am getting air flow and some very light cutting action. It looks like I'm even spraying some moisture. There is no dust extraction system and there is very little dust blowing around inside the cabinet. When I pull the gun apart, I do see a few little caked together chunks. The feed hose does get full of media. PSI set to 100 and it looks to have the smallest nozzle, 0.18". At this point, I'm just interested in getting it working well enough to complete a small job. Improvements will follow later. I do have a wet vac to use for dust extraction. I have a number of questions.

1. Are blasting guns tolerant of any caking/ clumping or does it need to be totally powder? Do I need to clean out the whole system and start over? How much media is needed?
2. I'm in the process of rebuilding a 45 year old Honda motorcycle engine. This is a revival not a restoration. It has some baked on clay that purple cleaner, pressure washing and everything else I have tried will not touch so I got the cabinet. Soda seems to be the big thing today but I'm guessing it is not going to get that baked on clay. I also need to remove some paint. Are there any recommendation on what media to use? In this situation over cutting is better than under cutting and taking forever.
3. Will any small moisture filter remove the moisture?
4. Any other recommendations for this situation?

 

[Drkuhar]

1. they dont like any moisture at all, clumping all needs cleaned out. amount of media is dependent on which cabinet and pickup you are using
2. i would use glass bead that hf sells, soda isnt going to cut anything. it is safe for aluminum and is fairly aggressive when new. dont use course sand or iron oxide, both will eat into aluminum and need more air to work and iron oxide will actually cause rusting on aluminum as the iron dust imbeds in the aluminum.
3 I use a small air moisture separator but I would wonder if your air compressor has enough volume. the siphon tube style pickups take a lot of volume of air . if you have a small tank and it runs all the time it can cause the moisture issues