Unveiling the Fastest Cleaning Abrasive Blasting Cabinets

The fastest cleaning abrasive blasting cabinets differ depending on your application. It’s not as simple as sizing up your gun size to clean faster. A bigger gun can have enough frictional heat to welt sheet steel. You can almost plasma cut thinner steel with a direct pressure if you turn up the pressure.

So, if a bigger gun isn’t the answer, how can we know which are the fastest cleaning abrasive blasting cabinets? The answer is: it depends.

4 General “Rules” about Abrasive Blast Cabinet Cleaning Speed

Generally speaking, cutting abrasive is faster than round non-cutting abrasive. Dry abrasive delivery is much faster than Wet Blasting (also called vapor blasting). But there are some applications that cannot use dry abrasive blasting, for example implants require wet blasting.  This is because bone likes to grow around a cutting abrasive pattern, but dry blasting will leave some of the abrasive in the surface of the part rendering it not sterile.

If we had to pick the fastest cleaning abrasive blasting cabinets from a functional standpoint, it might be siphon blasting. Siphon automated abrasive delivery is much faster than direct pressure, but siphon is slower in linear blasting speed. We have already explained this in another post, read more here.

Heavy deposits only clean with direct pressure. If you are blasting Blind Holes or Turbo Housing, direct pressure is the only way to achieve this.

You are limited in your air CFM if you are blasting at home with a single-phase piston air compressor and a 220-volt single phase home electrical power panel. The most air you can buy is just over 20 to 25 cfm at 100 psi so a light duty cabinet is all you can operate. That doesn’t mean you’re stuck operating at a snail’s pace. You can buy a large capacity dust collector, like these and these, that is self-cleaning to improve your cleaning speed.

You Need the Fastest Cleaning Abrasive Blasting Cabinets for Your Application

As you can see this question is not simple to answer, if it was, everyone would be making abrasive blasting cabinets. At Media Blast® we are unmatched in our machine catalog’s depth and breadth. We have nearly a half-century of experience building abrasive blasting cabinets and support equipment.

If you still say you want to know the fastest cleaning abrasive blasting cabinets, then it’s probably a direct pressure model with the largest handheld nozzle using 90 to 100 cfm air volume. Fill it with 60 mesh aluminum oxide abrasive and you will have a very fast bright metal linear strip cleaned. You will also need to stop and fill the pressure pot about every 3 to 4 minutes. This is due to the required design of this type of pressure delivery model using the question. The direct pressure will have more maintenance time and that means less production output. Add up the pot reloading time and the additional maintenance and the abrasive being used will make the decision if it is feasible. So, is this the fastest cleaning? Yes, possibly. But it’s not necessarily the most functional cabinet.

Give us a call and we can talk to you about what you need for the fastest cleaning based on your application.