What Makes a Proper Blasting Cabinet Design?

Blasting cabinet design are more than an enclosure to contain the blasting operation, a trigger operated paint gun for on and off abrasive delivery and a looped abrasive supply hose down into the abrasive with an entrance hole in the hose.

To ensure you buy the right machine the first time, buy a machine based on your application. Your decision should come down to Wet or Dry Blasting, Siphon or Direct Pressure, the compressed air usage, the need for a machine from Light Duty to full Industrial Production, and the type of abrasive to be used for what you are cleaning.

Pro Tip: Think about blasting cabinets like vehicles. There are vehicles for city trips and easy parking, vehicles to make you comfortable on long trips with family, and vehicles to pull 40,000 pounds across country day after day. They all have their own applications. You wouldn’t buy a Chevy Volt to haul a boat, nor would you buy an RV to make your daily commute to the office, and you shouldn’t buy a home-use abrasive blasting cabinet for a production application.

When you first Google Sandblasting Cabinet you may find lots of large tool suppliers with ads for blasting cabinets you would use at home if you are simply buying budget.  In the Industry we call these cabinet “Sight Sellers”. They are pointed at selling you what you want, low cost blasting cabinet that operates using that 6 cfm compressor you pump up your tires with.  What you want to buy and what you need may not be of any use.

Three Factors that Affect Proper Blasting Cabinet Design

1. Choosing the right size dust collector and blast gun operation (manual, semi-automatic and automatic) gun movement. Without understanding your application, you can’t select the correct dust collector and appropriate cleaning features for your machine. Someone that operates a small machine infrequently in their home garage will have vastly different needs from someone who operates a machine as part of a production facility or simply wants a clean area.
2. Selecting the right compressed air for your application. Sandblasting cabinets use compressed air to convey the abrasive to the part being processed. CFM (compressed air) volume determines the frictional heat created by any blasting cabinet as much as the blasting pressure and abrasive determines cleaning rates.
3. Matching the gun cfm size to the dust collector cfm size. To do this, it helps to deal with a company that understands the Mohs scale (mineral hardness scale) of abrasives, RMS (root means square) of the surface profile, and variables that affect frictional heat. It is possible you need no frictional heat and a wet blasting cabinet.

Making a blasting containment cabinet requires no real knowledge about abrasive blasting so you find cabinets made from wooden boxes to used 55 gallon drum.  Keeping you safe, eliminating the high wear parts created by the process, and keeping the area clean around the machine are what sets professional manufacturers apart from DIY cabinet makers found on YouTube – which is why we don’t recommend using a DIY cabinet.

To Sum It Up

Media Blast and Abrasives manufactures over 170 different media blasting cabinets including Wet, Dry, Micro, Plastic and Soda, Siphon and Direct Pressure. Our experts can help recommend the machine model that’s right for you based on Gun or nozzle CFM size, abrasive delivery in pounds per minute, type of abrasive needed to do the job, the proper sizing of the dust collector, and much more.

Our experts can answer questions about Tungsten Di-Sulfide and GhostFlow Soda™ flow, also advise you about wet blasting for chemically clean surface without impregnation of abrasive into the part surface used for medical devices and semiconductors. We make machines for home use, laboratory use, and industry – so we have the right machine for your needs!