Wet Sandblaster?

Last week they used a wet sandblaster to clean a frame on Muscle Car. The results looked pretty good and with some light brushing with a wire wheel on an angle grinder it looked ready for primer and paint. It was a power washer with a special wand with a hose near the top to pull sand thru the nozzle. Anyone used anything like this?

 

We used to wet blast stucco homes for prep for re-stucco and later California decided that was the way to do steel in industrial applications. It works real well to keep the fugitive dust down as intended. You just need a primer formulated to be applied over mild rust.
We once had a blast job at Goldfields near Glamis and had to use slag b/c of the problem with airborne silica dust being a health hazard.

 

I used one on parts of my jeep. It worked very well. I used a 5 gal bucket to keep the sand in and the siphon tube went down in it. It used sand like crazy. The bad part of that is you could not recycle the sand because it was wet. The tip on the one I used wore out quickly and that caused the pattern to be not so concentrated. As far as surface rust, it formed as soon as the peice dried. It did not take much effort to remove then spray some primer.

I was also using a 3500 psi Honda pressure washer. I am not sure how that affects performance. Good Luck Mike.

 

Their blaster was a 2500 psi, they said for a frame they used 7 bags at 7.00 per bag.

 

Northern Hydralics has them ..I used them and still do ..just had one delivered two weeks ago and used it for a truck frame...

 

The wet blaster we used was a 600 cfm Ingersoll Rand compressor using a conventional 10 bag sandblast pot. At the nozzle is a small water feed that trickled in enough water to keep the dust down. A guy with a small blast pot could do the same thing with a garden hose reduced down to a 3/8" or so with a small ball vavle to adjust the water flow.

 

Now you got me thinking, and I don't do that very well. Would it be possible to use a reducer on a garden hose with a tube running down to a pot of sand? Say maybe a 1/4" metal tube on the hose and a rubber one running down to sand?
Keith

 

junkfood, the arrangement was just about that simple. Reduce the hose down to 1/4" feed and attach to nozzle with a 1/4" 90 to direct water into the blast media. We used 3/8" line with a valve at the 90 to meter the water.

 

Has anyone had experience with the baking soda blasting? I saw it on one of the TV hot rod shows a few weeks back. I wonder how messy THAT is.

 

I have never seen one in person but it looked like that to me. The ones I have seen on line look like they just have a connection near the tip with a hose running down to the media bucket. I guess it just uses the suction created from the water passing over the hose fitting to suck the media up into the water.
I just might have to play with that and see.
Keith

 

I've had an old Jaguar soda blasted. It works extremely well for removing paint without heating or harming the panels underneath. It will not remove any rust though. It was nice in that you could rinse the car and the soda would dissolve and wash off, unlike sand blasting.