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I've been doing a little (quite a bit) of reading up of late about varying forms of media blasting and other options out there, for various tasks, not limited to cleaning up certain alloy wheels, brake calipers, and suspension components we sell in work. Obviously there are considerations to take in for each type of item.
With a wheel, I have hated having them grit- or sand-blasted, ever since I had some rare wheels pock-marked many years ago before repainting them myself. More lately, I've had them acid-dipped by a local refurbishing place, which produces a much smoother finish, but my painter is not a massive fan of having to then clean them down before spraying to make sure no contaminants are left under the paint.
With the likes of calipers, you have flaky, rusty steel (sometimes ally) parts needing a coarse blast to clean them up, but with rubber seals that you don't necessarily want to rip to pieces. I've seen calipers done by grit-blasting, and the grit has destroyed the seals and left grit and dust inside the piston; and I've also seen aqua/vapour blasting results which look all that but may have taken ages (people seem sketchy on explaining the process).
And of course then you have solid metal pieces like a suspension arm or strut, where it's all solid metal so you could use a different method again. Sometimes I've seen of good results from soda blasting, sometimes sand blasting, but all seem to take a long time to clean the parts up, especially if they have good paint on them as it tends to be something tough like powdercoating or epoxy.
I'm looking at what might be the best and most suitable form to use for the kind of needs I'm encountering - even if that means two or three various methods. Particularly I'd like to focus on methods that aren't too environmentally harmful, or that don't leave masses of spillage/waste, especially if it's bio-hazardous. That kind of rules out most chemical options.
Has anyone got any good, useful or hands-on practical info? Most of what I'm finding is various firms pushing what they use or sell supplies for.
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Feb 27, 2018 11:09:25 GMT
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Your point about the chemical options is significant - as a business you'll have different regulations with regard to storage and use of chemicals suitable for stripping. A local firm used to do various kinds of chemical stripping on a small scale, but now only does blasting prior to their powder coating process just because of the H&S implications being more than they wanted to deal with.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:09:50 GMT
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Quite. There are a great number of regulations any business must follow, but for the small amount of usage being considered here, significantly adding to that list of regulations with hazardous media is something preferably avoided. Obviously we'll have suits and extraction to sort with almost any of the possible options but that's not so strenuous.
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Feb 27, 2018 21:42:20 GMT
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It all comes down to what you want - I use various processes dependant upon the results required - but in the main I outsource it - I have a good blaster whom can do anything from heavy duty blasting down to thin outer body panels, vapour blasting is great for alloy including engine blocks / heads / gearbox casings etc, if I need a body shell taken back to bare metal I have it dipped but there is only one company that I would ever use, soda blasting is good for smaller parts like carb bodies, I would not consider having brake callipers blasted unless they were fully stripped though - although you can kit yourself up for all of this by the time you have purchased the kit, materials, maintained it, fallen over it three times and then the time spent using it - it's just way easier to get someone else to do it.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Feb 28, 2018 11:10:44 GMT
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Yeh, you just have to choose the appropriate method from each job. If you want to do everything you need all the kit. Theres no catch all process. Any specific questions?
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Feb 28, 2018 11:32:34 GMT
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As for the vapour blasting. Great process but expensive kit. Its a mixture of liquid and grit. The liquid cushions the impacts for a good finish and helps wash away dirt. You use a detergent/degreaser in it to help clean away oil etc that would just clog up dry blasting processes. Perfect for stuff like alloy engine components, they come out sparkling..
The liquid also acts as a coolant and you can use water spray nozzles on bodywork and the like to stop it warping. The warping of thin steel doesn't come (as most people think) from the force of the blasting. Its the heating of the panel. Ofcourse the downside is bare steel and water don't mix.. You got to dry it off really quick and possibly follow with a light soda blast or somthing like that to clean away any oxides that have had a chance to form. Not to mention corrosion inhibitors and what not. I'd like to say I'm an expert but more an expert on what not to do with wet blast atm.. 😁
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Last Edit: Feb 28, 2018 11:33:56 GMT by slater
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stealthstylz
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 14,842
Club RR Member Number: 174
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Feb 28, 2018 23:16:42 GMT
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Wet blasting seems to struggle taking paint and silicone sealers off. All blasting takes ages though, the companies that do it already are pretty cheap. I sand blasted a Saxo front strut yesterday at work and it took a good half hour to get rid of all the scaly rust.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:44:45 GMT
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All helpful. I'll have more specific questions later but this is preliminary fact finding, hopefully from those with some experience. I have blasted myself before, but only using a small homemade cabinet years ago for personal use.
I've talked about this before, but in England, you probably have several places locally offering various blasting processes. In NI, it's a half hour drive (13.5 miles through two villages and a town centre) to get to the alloy wheel dipping place, or the place that (badly) zinc coats split rim bolts (which must be cleaned of rust first, which is another place again). Another place does sand, another place soda, and the place that does shells never answers the phone, and the next closest is over an hour away.
While it might take a long time, I fancy that the time spent traveling will be the same. I.e., to strip four wheels in an acid bath at £10 each, plus half an hour each way to drop them off, same again to pick them up another day, so two hours wages, plus fuel for the van, well now you're at £80.
It'll soon pay for itself.
Vapour blasting I think would add some value to the oily engine and other mechanical parts I sell - and to the cars we build.
Selling strut housings that have been de-rusted and left in primer or bare, ready for paint, will make them worth more and more appealing than some ancient old rusty struts.
It's all about the service, the USP, and solving a problem that I've been butting my head against for several years (availability, cost and time of having these things done) so it's worth pursuing. Even as a possible business venture it may be worth looking at, as it's relatively low cost to start-up, but no idea what returns look like as yet, for now I'm primarily looking at in-house use.
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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If your looking at doing rusty/painted steel you will really need a pressure pot type blasting system, either in a room or a large cabinet and ofcourse then a decent compressor to run it. Your looking at 100cfm and up really, large hydrovanes or screw compressors. Don't think you can just buy a suction feed cabinet and run it off a normal workshop compressor. You will be there for days just doing a strut!
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If your looking at doing rusty/painted steel you will really need a pressure pot type blasting system, either in a room or a large cabinet and ofcourse then a decent compressor to run it. Your looking at 100cfm and up really, large hydrovanes or screw compressors. Don't think you can just buy a suction feed cabinet and run it off a normal workshop compressor. You will be there for days just doing a strut! And that's exactly why I outsource - my chap is good at what he does and reasonable with the pricing - to kit yourself up properly for blasting even with second hand kit and you will be several £k in and that's before you build yourself a blast room - although the best way of doing this if you have room on site is to purchase and convert a 20' shipping container by installing a extraction system / lighting etc - it may look an easy option to kit yourself up but don't under estimate the cost & time resource that it will take and to make it pay you will need a pretty constant throughput of work. |
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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Yeh. I think it depends on your situation. I happen to have a room to do it in. The kit isn't really a cost, it's an investment. Its just the media, electric and wear and tare. I think if I took into account time loading, delivery time, fuel, hassle of dealing with other people etc it would work out roughly the same time wise but alot less cost. Plus having my own facilities allows me to be flexible. No need for a massive batch at once that all needs painting at once etc.
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I simply don't have room for it - I have a decent size blast cabinet upstairs that will take a decent size body panel / door etc - to be honest it's not worth the effort - the vast majority my of clients work is bare metal restorations / bare metal repaints so it's easier just to remove the all panels and drop them off in a batch to the basters or dippers - the blast cabinet does have it uses though for the smaller stuff / brackets / hinge boxes etc - if I then add in the fact that the best use of my time - is restoring / fabrication & paintwork - horses for courses for wants of a better expression
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the self built small shipping container was exactly what came to mind having seen a few videos of Will's yard, move two or 3 cars and it'd fit in quite nicely without losing too much.
media blasting I think would be the process with least involvement of health and safety and licencing, suit up with an appropriate blasting suit with breathing apparatus is it I think, dust extraction and filtration is another thing to consider.
anything that involves chemicals gets a lot more complex so speaking to HSE and DOE would get you a lot of information about what you need to do.
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If your looking at doing rusty/painted steel you will really need a pressure pot type blasting system, either in a room or a large cabinet and ofcourse then a decent compressor to run it. Your looking at 100cfm and up really, large hydrovanes or screw compressors. Don't think you can just buy a suction feed cabinet and run it off a normal workshop compressor. You will be there for days just doing a strut! I'm surprised at those estimations. Not arguing, just surprised. The little bit of grit blasting I did some years ago was all done using a 12cfm compressor with a 3hp engine. I did a load of stuff and I don't recall it taking an exorbitant amount of time, in fact as I used it throughout my teens when I had zero patience it could not have been arduous at all. But I have a compressor now that will manage I should think - 200 or 250 cfm iirc. OH - thinking back - this is for vapour blasting (media sustained in water)? I can see where that would take much more highly pressurised equipment. And that's exactly why I outsource - my chap is good at what he does and reasonable with the pricing - to kit yourself up properly for blasting even with second hand kit and you will be several £k in and that's before you build yourself a blast room - although the best way of doing this if you have room on site is to purchase and convert a 20' shipping container by installing a extraction system / lighting etc - it may look an easy option to kit yourself up but don't under estimate the cost & time resource that it will take and to make it pay you will need a pretty constant throughput of work. A few grand is kind of what I was expecting setup might cost, and that's not much relative to any other business set-up costs. Like you I've plenty of other things to do, I don't want to spend my own actual time doing it, but I've guys working for me that can, and that will mean I'm paying less and can be more fussy over finish / have more of an input into the quality of the job. We've enough stuff to do to warrant looking into it, and of course there will always be that potential to open it up to customers later on. But blasting aside, the acid dipping could be a difficulty with HSE, but I've come across it being used by home mechanics, so it can't be that difficult to contain and use. I started to get a bit of info off the guy I use who does hundreds of wheels every week, but naturally he was reluctant to tell me everything. I definitely need to sort something better out for doing wheels as that's a big priority - unless of course aqua/vapour blasting is as good as it makes out, and it could double up for doing wheels. The simplicity (and lack of labour cost) of leaving them in a tank overnight and coming back to bare metal is hard to ignore though. |
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If your looking at doing rusty/painted steel you will really need a pressure pot type blasting system, either in a room or a large cabinet and ofcourse then a decent compressor to run it. Your looking at 100cfm and up really, large hydrovanes or screw compressors. Don't think you can just buy a suction feed cabinet and run it off a normal workshop compressor. You will be there for days just doing a strut! I'm surprised at those estimations. Not arguing, just surprised. The little bit of grit blasting I did some years ago was all done using a 12cfm compressor with a 3hp engine. I did a load of stuff and I don't recall it taking an exorbitant amount of time, in fact as I used it throughout my teens when I had zero patience it could not have been arduous at all. But I have a compressor now that will manage I should think - 200 or 250 cfm iirc. OH - thinking back - this is for vapour blasting (media sustained in water)? I can see where that would take much more highly pressurised equipment. And that's exactly why I outsource - my chap is good at what he does and reasonable with the pricing - to kit yourself up properly for blasting even with second hand kit and you will be several £k in and that's before you build yourself a blast room - although the best way of doing this if you have room on site is to purchase and convert a 20' shipping container by installing a extraction system / lighting etc - it may look an easy option to kit yourself up but don't under estimate the cost & time resource that it will take and to make it pay you will need a pretty constant throughput of work. A few grand is kind of what I was expecting setup might cost, and that's not much relative to any other business set-up costs. Like you I've plenty of other things to do, I don't want to spend my own actual time doing it, but I've guys working for me that can, and that will mean I'm paying less and can be more fussy over finish / have more of an input into the quality of the job. We've enough stuff to do to warrant looking into it, and of course there will always be that potential to open it up to customers later on. But blasting aside, the acid dipping could be a difficulty with HSE, but I've come across it being used by home mechanics, so it can't be that difficult to contain and use. I started to get a bit of info off the guy I use who does hundreds of wheels every week, but naturally he was reluctant to tell me everything. I definitely need to sort something better out for doing wheels as that's a big priority - unless of course aqua/vapour blasting is as good as it makes out, and it could double up for doing wheels. The simplicity (and lack of labour cost) of leaving them in a tank overnight and coming back to bare metal is hard to ignore though. Your compressor would have to be a monster of a thing to manage the 200 - 250 cubic foot per minute - it's more than likely that it has a 200 - 250 litre volume tank and probably a pump that manages 14 - 16 cfm This is my compressor that I had custom built has a 23 cfu 3 stage pump powered by a 3 phase 5 hp motor to a 270 litre tank - and this is a fair sized unit   A compressor with a 200 / 250 litre tank with a pump in the range of 14 - 16 cfm would be fine for small / medium scale blasting cabinets but no good for industrial blasting |
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But blasting aside, the acid dipping could be a difficulty with HSE, but I've come across it being used by home mechanics, so it can't be that difficult to contain and use. With the limited stuff I've done myself, the actual use of the acid isn't difficult at all because I've just been using stuff I can buy on-line, although that might explain some limited results. But as I said earlier, as a company you'll have far more rules than I have as a home user - no-one knows I'm doing it, for a start. |
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Last Edit: Mar 6, 2018 20:41:47 GMT by Blown_Imp
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That water blasting looks great. Where does the karcher adapter come from?
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slater
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 6,390
Club RR Member Number: 78
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EBay.. Hes linked it above the video..
I guess it's down to perspective a bit. To me that video looks painfully slow. Imagine having to do the whole car and then how much water that would take etc. Doesn't bare thinking about. Fine for doing a small bit tho i guess!
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I've got one of those attachments somewhere, but I've never tried it. It just doesn't seem right to spray all that water at a panel I've just blasted back to bare metal.
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