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Abrasive Blasting 101: Everything You Need to Know
Media blasting abrasives are one of the least understood aspects of the abrasive blasting industry. This is partly because we use terms that haven’t advanced with blasting technology, and partly because Media Blast & Abrasives is one of the only manufactures dedicated to educating users.
“Sandblast Cabinet” was the first Trade Name used to describe any generic abrasive blasting cabinet. Unfortunately, sand is a single use abrasive that does not recycle and is therefore not well-suited for blasting cabinets. At first, sand was used as an abrasive because it was low cost and abundant, but it soon became problematic. Turning up the blasting pressure causes sand to explode on impact, turning it to dust. Although sand is capable of quickly removing unwanted surface coatings using high-velocity compressed air, the dust byproduct is unsafe. While sand is still used today, its use is very regulated. It has been replaced by another by-product created by the mining industry called Slags.
Huge piles of slag waste are created by strip mining extraction companies during the smelting process. Slags are inexpensive, like sand, but rate a higher hardness and offer no health hazards. Even still, slags are still not advised for use inside blasting cabinets because their snowflake shape does not recycle well.
The blasting cabinet industry needed hard, recyclable media blasting abrasives. And they turned to what have become the industry standard: glass beads, steel shot, aluminum oxide, silicon carbide and soda. This is why Media Blast® shipped its first media blasting cabinet almost 5 decades ago with a tag on the view window saying, “you don’t find ham in a hamburger or find sand in a sandblaster”.
Media Blast & Abrasives is a very intentional company name. From day one, our team has wanted to differentiate our products from the misused term “Sandblasting Cabinets” and educate users about the reasons not to use sand in blast cabinets. It’s our goal to make users aware how important it is to use safe, high-quality media blasting abrasives that recycle at very high rates.
ProTip: Quality Blasting Media is used to describe harder quality abrasives used inside blasting cabinets that recycle at high rates due to hardness and the shape of the abrasive.
Our brand name, Media Blast®, has become the industry standard for excellence for a reason. We offer abrasive blasting cabinets for all applications – wet and dry blasting, siphon, gravity, and direct pressure abrasive delivery, and all the special media blasting abrasives like soda, plastic, ceramic beads, and steel shot. We want to help you choose the right machine for your use the very first time and save you money spent replacing a machine that was never going to meet your needs.
Check out our extensive online machine catalog for more information about our blast cabinets. Give us a call to get your Application Note Sheet started ending with the right machine model quotation. Talking directly to a half-century old manufacturer is the fastest way to your successful blasting solution.
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