Tips for Achieving Clean Abrasive Blasting Cabinets

Media Blast & Abrasives has been making the original Mediablaster® cabinets for nearly half a century! We know the ins and outs of cabinet manufacturing and operation. Our machines are clean abrasive blasting cabinets and we match them to your Daily Duty Cycle (DDC). Unfortunately, that’s not always the case for other sandblasting cabinets. 

Why is my Sandblast Cabinet so dusty?

This is a common question we get from people who purchase a sandblasting cabinet based primarily on budget cost alone. Buyers don’t understand why they can’t achieve clean abrasive blasting cabinets. Usually, they have purchased a machine from a seller that know very little about abrasive blasting cabinets and even less about blasting applications. So these retailers sell what the Blasting Industry calls “Sight Sellers.” These are generic machines with very little technical information available, just a big box, window and glove ports. Buyers rely mostly on the lowest cost and biggest box to determine their purchase. Over the years, we’ve determined four primary reasons “sight sellers” result in dusty blasting conditions.

Four Reasons You Don’t Have Clean Abrasive Blasting Cabinets

• There’s something wrong with your abrasive. Maybe you’re using the wrong abrasive type and not cleaning the dust collector enough. Or you’re using too high a blasting pressure for the abrasive type being used. Often Big Box Stores that know nothing about sandblast cabinets sell low-cost soft cutting abrasives like SLAG. Slag is a one-time use abrasive used with portable blasting pots. This means the abrasive media isn’t designed for recycling, like a cabinet requires, or even a blast room. These stores want inexpensive inventory and therefore they stock slag. But the slag explodes upon impact, fills the dust collector and makes it nearly impossible to achieve a clean abrasive blasting cabinets. 
• You might be using a Light Duty Blast Cabinet beyond its DDC, Daily Duty Cycle. Many imported blasting cabinets are 5% DDC using a small pistol trigger gun that cleans slowly and is rated at less than 30 minutes a day operation. Using these machines more than the required DDC requires the user to stop working and clean the small dust collector often. So what happens if you do run it for hours? Then you find the dust collector can’t keep air flowing out of the blast cabinet and the result is a low-visibility, dusty cabinet.
• Your cabinet simply leaves the dust being removed inside the cabinet with the good abrasive. The key is knowing how to recycle the abrasive and remove the dust! 
• Almost all of these low cost blasting cabinets use a low cfm blower with low cfm ratings or even sell the cabinet less dust collector advising you use a generic shop vacuum. Almost all imported blasting cabinets use shop vacuum blowers because they are inexpensive and move low cabinet air changes. Unfortunately, the low cfm airflow doesn’t remove the good abrasive or even the dust. Even with perfectly welded blast cabinets, it’s impossible to maintain a clean work area with a low cfm shop vac.  When you open the door, the dust in the cabinet flows out into the room.

For even more information about troubleshooting dusty blasting cabinets, check out 5 Reasons Your Blast Cabinet Creates Excessive Dust.

What’s the Most Important Feature Contributing to Clean Abrasive Blasting Cabinets?

The dust collector. Did you know that sometimes the dust collector can be more expensive than the actual cabinet? Often sellers know you are not looking at the dust collector’s specifications, only the large cabinet size with a small slow low frictional heat trigger gun sized for you small air compressor. So, they intentionally do not list the information about the dust collector in the sales materials. 

The Dust Collector is what decides the Daily Duty Cycle (DDC) of any blasting machine, and also what determines the difference between clean abrasive blasting cabinets and a messy headache. Always look for the dust collector filter size and blower cfm rating before buying any abrasive blasting cabinet.  A good rule of thumb is to buy a machine with at least 100 square feet of dust collector filter surface area, and at least a 300-cfm blower. This is what you need to maintain a clean work area

To Sum It Up

At Media Blast & Abrasives we want to help you buy the right machine the first time. This means we care about how you’re going to use your blasting cabinet – the application – and want to pair you with the right Mediablaster® Cabinet for your specific needs, one without the mess. 

We offer Wet and Dry, Siphon, and Direct Pressure abrasive delivery. And Light Duty, General Purpose and Industrial capacity models with Daily Duty Cycles, DDC, from 5% to 100%.

If you’re not sure which Media Blast® Mediablaster® Model is right for you, visit our Buying Guide or Contact Us.