How Cabinet Media Blasters Eliminate Blast Rooms

Did you know some media blasters, also called blasting cabinets, can be used to blast large parts instead of blasting rooms?

What is a Blast Room?

Blast rooms are used to process extra-large parts. Some things, like automobiles, may require an entire blast room.  But there are many applications that don’t require that allocation of resources. This is where media blasters come in handy.

Disadvantages of Blast rooms

• Cost: A blast room can be very costly to buy and operate. This is because of both the space and the health and safety measures it requires. It’s normal to use a low-hardness abrasive in most blast rooms, which contributes to much of the lost revenue. 
• Intense manual labor: The most cost-effective way to reload the abrasive back into the blast room pressure pot is manually using a shovel!  
• Contamination: This is a common problem with blast rooms requiring total abrasive purge after three recycles. A large pressure pot is necessary to make blasting time productive and avoid the operator spending all day reloading and shoveling abrasives off the floor. Blast rooms can have automatic abrasive recovery but normally that feature costs more than the room and dust collector combined.

Every company with a blast room also has mediablaster® cabinets. This is because Industrial Cabinets all recycle and reload the pressure pot almost automatically. It’s prohibitively expensive to run a blasting room for every single part that needs to be processed. Anything you can load inside the cabinet or onto a mobile work cart complete with turntable allows the operator to reach the part for blast.

Many double-wide and quad media blasters exist. These cabinets are up to 10’ wide and offer both siphon and direct pressure abrasive delivery systems with automatic abrasive recycle and pressure pot reloading. Direct Pressure cabinets allow a longer reach for the operator standing on the outside of the cabinet, so pressure delivery is the most common delivery method in cabinets.

Design is everything

When you’re working with large parts the design of the mediablaster® is critical to successful blasting.

Our media blaster design comes with the following features that allow for efficient operation:

• Multiple operator work ports to cover a part 10’ long using more than one blasting station.
• Mobile Work Cart allows the part to be loaded outside the cabinet using an overhead crane or forklift and then easily loaded inside.
• Most mobile carts include a turntable for part rotation so the operator can stand in one location outside and cover 360 degrees.
• A raised operator station allows the operator to blast down on most parts.

It can be slower to process a part with a double wide and quad using 4 hoppers compared to processing a part in a blasting room. But it’s likely much time is saved with the cabinet thanks to automatic recycle and abrasive pot reloading. It takes more time to manipulate the part inside the cabinet than it does to walk around a part inside a blast room, but the operator does it all in the clothes they came to work in. But media blasters can more than make up for this lost time in the revenue saved in lower operating costs.

To Sum It Up

To sum it up, double wide and quad media blasters can be alternatives to a blast room. It’s important to have realistic expectations: no cabinet will have the same production output as a blast room. But not all applications require maximum daily output.

To see if one of our cabinets is a good fit to replace some of your blast room projects, reach out to us.