What is a Sandblaster Cabinet?

A sandblaster cabinet is a modified, enclosed cabinet or chamber that contains any abrasive blasting gun operation. Ranging from low to high speeds, abrasive impacts a part’s surface creating a physical change. This process is used during part manufacturing, rebuilding, strengthening, deburring, cleaning, coating, and more. 

These sandblaster cabinets can be Wet or Dry abrasive delivery, Siphon, Gravity Feed, or Direct Pressure Abrasive Delivery. The cabinet itself is used for containing and recycling the abrasive used in the sand blasting process. 

In dry blasting, the gun uses compressed air to pneumatically siphon abrasive grains and then accelerate the grains to much higher speeds inside the siphon delivery nozzle. This abrasive delivery can also pneumatically push abrasive grains using direct pressure delivery. This delivery is similar to how a bullet is pushed out the barrel of a gun using a shell exploding behind the bullet.  

Does a Sandblaster Cabinet Actually Use Sand?

Even though the common term for these machines is “sandblaster cabinet” we prefer the term media blast cabinet. Most cabinets don’t use sand, they use abrasive media. Sandblast Cabinets do not use sand for abrasive for two simple reasons:

1. Sand is so soft and breaks so easily that it is impossible to recycle and will plug any dust collector quickly. Sand can easily break into particle sizes that are too small to maintain consistent blasting speed inside the sandblast cabinet. 
2. Sand can pose a serious Health Hazzard when used improperly. There are many OSHA rules and restrictions for operating sandblaster cabinets and media blast rooms. All of our Media Blast® machines meet or exceed these requirements.   

Better than sand, Media Blasting Cabinets

Media Blast & Abrasives understood the inherent problems using sand inside any blasting cabinets. For these reasons, we used the name Media Blast® and mediablaster® for our signature line of Blasting Cabinet equipment. Our machine catalog is now the largest line of sandblaster cabinets made by one company. 

We only use safe, high-quality abrasives that are hard enough to recycle over and over again. The very first machine we shipped included a tag on the window saying, “you don’t use sand in a Media Blast Cabinet, and you don’t find ham in a hamburger!”  

Although the term media blast cabinet is used by many manufactures around the world, there is only one mediablaster® and that’s a machine made by Media Blast & Abrasives. Without the ® mark it will not be a true Media Blast® Cabinet, just an imitation sandblaster cabinet.

To Sum it Up

A sandblaster cabinet is used to contain the abrasive blasting process. It can be wet or dry, siphon, gravity feed, or direct pressure. Media Blast & Abrasives has been manufacturing abrasive blasting cabinets for nearly half-a-century. We understand that removing the dust from the used abrasive is the key to good visibility and also create a safe-to-operate cabinet. We do offer a Media Blast line of equipment that only uses the abrasive one time. This is our Soda Blasting Cabinet Line, and it uses a very efficient separator reclaimer as well as GhostFlow® Technology to reduce the volume of abrasive used per hour.

If you’re not sure which abrasive blasting cabinet is right for you, reach out to us and we’ll help you find the right machine the first time!