Choosing the right sandblasting machine.

[erik winkler]

Happy New Year everybody!

I am still trying to figure out what I should do when having to sandblast.
For months now this problem is bugging me and my production in letterhead styled signs (glass and wood).
I know for some of you this is a problem long overdue, but for me it is new.
All help and information to consider here is thankfully appreciated.

Choices I have:
1. Outsourcing.
2. Buy an indoor sandblasting cabinet.
3. Buy an outdoor sandblasting machine.

Negatives of number 1.:
A lot of extra costs everytime.
A lot of driving to and from.
Showing supposed competition how I work and design.


This machine costs about 2000 euro.
Sold in England.
Has two doors on the side and a split opening on the sides and top so that oversized wooden or glass panels can enter.


This machine costs about 1000 euro.
Sold in Nederland.
Has two doors on the side and a (glas)door on top.
No oversized panel can be blasted inside!







This machine costs about 120 euro.
Sold in Nederland.
Must be used outside.
BUT HOW DO I RETRIEVE MY EXPENSIVE BLASTING MEDIA OUTSIDE?
No ship container or something like that available in our outside my shop, due to limited space.

[Roderick Treece]

Eric,
First thing I would do is ask yourself ,What am I going to be doing with it.

Small pieces
Larger pieces
Frosting/etching
Deep carving

All the money I've spent on Blasting equipment has more than paid for it's self.My blasting equipment makes more money than anything else in my studio.I started with a walk up to wooden SB cabinet .It had a way to small of dust collection system attached to it.My next one was a walk in booth ,Fresh air helmet and way to small of dust collection system.Now I have a small room with a over sized dust collector and a fresh air helmet.I can be in there all day and always be able to see great.

The booth is over kill for small things.One of these days I might set up my walk cabinet again.

The most important thing to me is DUST COLLECTION!

[Mike Jackson]

Erik,
Besides the little booths you show, you need to also consider the air source. You will also need a compressor capable of keeping up with the sandblast pot. For small glass etching, you can get away with a reasonably priced 2-3hp compressor, but that assumes the opening at the nozzle is relatively small. You will see all kinds of ratings on compressors, such as 2.5 CFM at 90 PSI, but you also need to watch for that third variable...nozzle diameter. At 1/8", not much air is escaping out the nozzle, but at 1/4", a lot of air is passing through it and it will drain the tank almost immdeiately. An industrial compressor can run at 100-150 CFM (Cubic Feet per Minute) at 100-175 PSI (Pounds per Square Inch) at 1/4" nozzle diameter all day long and never run low on air. They can cost $6,000 to $20,000. A mid-sized 3 HP, three cylinder, 220v compressor with a 50-80 gallon tank might cost $1,000. (I haven't priced on in a long time). It can power a small cabinet blaster for most projects, but it might start to bog down some if the nozzle is left open for a long time.

Blasting oustide with a large compressor and large sandblast pot is getting tougher to do. We did it for quite a while here in Jackson Hole, but when we moved here we were out at the edge of town in an almost industrial area. It has since grown up and there is some risk in releasing silica dust everywhere. You'd want to do some research on that topic in your area. Besides the equipment and eco issues, you also need some sort of safe breathing system. That requires a special hood, airconditioner, carbon filter and a compressor to supply the air. You won't be able to recover or reuse the sand or abrasive materials outside.

I would suggest you sub your blasting out as long as you can. Then rent the equipment once a week or once a month, and then buy the equipment only if you can afford it and if you have enough volume of sandblast work to pay for it. Sandblasting glass is a whole different issue. It takes much less equipment than blasting wood, stone, and so forth. Either way, you need a compressor to run it and an air filter system if you use a booth.

M. Jackson

[Larry White]

Hi Erik-
If you're going to do this type of work on a regular basis, then get the equipment to do the job. I'd get away from your option 1. You basically lose control of what's being done if you vend it out, plus you have to wait, lose time, and have an additional cost that you can avoid. Cross #1 off the list.

If I had to put something together, my first choice would be to build a walk-in booth, using an air supplied hood, pressure pot, and some sort of dust collector. With this, you could do any job, from large full frosted glass, to small pieces for glue chipping. It is also much easier to do intricate depth carved panels in this environment. This configuration would give you the maximum flexability in sandblasting.




My next choice would be to build my own cabinet to my own specifications. It too would use a pressure pot and have some sort of dust collection system. This is the one I currently have. Actually, I got this one from Mr. John Dickinson. It works quite well. I have it connected to my very large shop dust collection system.




Rick Glawson's version was a bit smaller. It was mainly used for frosting glass for glue chipping.



Rick's cabinet employed one of these type dust collectors:



The nice thing about building your own cabinet, is you can size it to the space you have available. With the commercial cabinets, you're stuck with the size and footprint it comes in.

There are definately a lot of different choices when it comes to configuring a sandblasting operation. Agreed, one of the easiest avenues would be to purchase a commercial sandblasting cabinet. TP Tools & Equipment has many options to choose from. I don't think anyone can definatively tell you what to get. I think you need to define what you'll want the equipment to do, then select the unit that meets your requirements. It appears that many of these commercial cabinets employ a siphon feed for the blasting media.



I'm not sure if you can regulate the amount of blasting media coming out of the tip. To me, this would be important. When using a pressure pot, the amount of blasting media can be regulated. One of the easiest mistakes to make is not having a compressor that delivers an adequate volume of air. It's the CFM (cubic feet per minute) that is required, not to be confused with PSI. I'm running a 375 CFM diesel compressor. With this, I could run two large sandblasting units at once. That's the dust collector on the right.



Hope all that helps.

Aho!

Looks like Mike and I were replying at about the same time....with two different viewpoints.

[Roderick Treece]

Hey Larry,Your gonna hurt your back blasting like that! The small blast cat dust collector is what I had and It DIDN"T SUCK dust worth a damm.It's better to have more dust collector than you need.It also helps if you have your ghost town to keep it in.

[erik winkler]

Roderick,
For now I am planning, to make sandblasted glass, prepared glass for glue chipping and sandblasting wooden signs.
The glass pieces will be about 4 feet by 3 feet maximum and the wood will be probably a fraction bigger.
Since i do not want to do buy half the machine and then later regret that I did not took the oversize option, I am thinking about the big cabinet.
It will just fit our shop and therefore will be a good option. Except the bigger the more exspensive.... And since I am still seeing this as my ultra-costly hobby I have to rethink all this well prepared. Maybe someday I will go and sell the signs I make.

Mike,
Air source
Big compressor
100-150 CFM (Cubic Feet per Minute) at 100-175 PSI (Pounds per Square Inch) with a 1/4" nozzle worth $6,000 to $20,000?!
Sounds great, but I can not invest that money out of my personal pocket, I want to go on a city trip now and than also.
So the mid-sized 3 HP, three cylinder, 220v compressor with a 50-80 gallon tank costing $1,000 sounds better.
But what CFM and PSI number do they have? Can I blast with the 1/4" nozzle with this amount of power?
I did one wooden sign at a local glass shop and it took aprox 1 hour!!!! for 3 feet by 3 feet; far too long in my opinion.
Blasting outside is not an option too hazardous for us and our neighbours.
Breathing system is no problem now haha since I have my Darth Vader mask and costume from 3M with carbon filters and everything haha. Remember the Hydrofluoric acid post:lol:

Larry,
I wish I could have a walk-in-booth. Except there is absolutely no space here!!! Square meters of building ground costs about the same as in downtown Tokio! And in the shop we are full!! I already examined in the probability to close the 20 feet high ceiling into two stories so that maybe we can place a cnc router, but that too has to wait with the upcoming recession. It is better to keep your spare money in the pocket than later having a dept at the bank.

So for me the right chouce will be somewhere between a light one just for blasting glass or a medium one wich can blast wood now and then also.
But still do not know excactly what minimum CFM and PSI I should have in blasting relatively comfortable on wood with a 1/4"nozzle...

Thanks already for your input, saw the post yesterday, but I had to recover from a New Years eve of alcohol abuse before I could reply.
Will never though the bottle again!

[Larry White]

It's hard to trust a man that doesn't drink a little....

...but not impossible.

[Mike Jackson]

Erik, it looks like you are doing your homework.

If you are going to do only glass, one of the smaller compressors will work. You can buy silicon carbide or aluminum oxide grit and use it a long, long time before it breaks down. Pulverized glass gets sucked up into the vacuum and filtered through the system. The heavier grit falls to the bottom and gets used again. No problems!

IF you are also saying you want to sandblast wood, you are asking for all kinds of other issues to surface. You NEED the larger compressor, hoses, and pot. There is no practical solution to this other than the industrial equipment. Trying to blast a large wooden sign with one of the glass blasters would be like putting a grade school football team against a college or pro team. Using our old equipment, I could blast one square foot of redwood per minute on average. Using a small blaster, you might expect one square foot per hour and it would be a botched looking product. Besides the equipment issue, when you blast 3/4" of an inch of redwood away from a piece wood, you have 3/4" of an inch of pulverized redwood dust floating around and some settling down into the sand or media. You then need some sort of heavy duty exhaust to pull the pulverized wood and pulverized media (sand) out of the area and into a filtration system. If using silica sand, you get good cutting action on the first use of the sand. It is less useable on a second pass if you attempt to do it, as the sand is finer and the sand is filled with fine wood dust.

They make a plastic sandblasting media...I heard is was ground up buttons. The media is quite expensive, but doesn't break down as quickly. It doesn't have the silica dust issue either. For this, you'd need a booth, an air collection system, some sort of method to get the media back to the hopper. We used it in a small glass booth on a few small projects, but it often left fine pieces of the media between the fins of the vertical grain redwood. The plastic media was hard on the hoses and nozzles.

As I said earlier, you should take your prepared signs to a commercial sandblaster and let them do it for as long as you can. You might even get them to let YOU do the sandblasting. No matter how much it costs you, or how inconvenienced you might think it feels, it sounds like it is really your only alternative if you are talking about wooden signs. Either you don't have the money for the industrial equipment, or you can't blast outside, or you don't have the space to build the right kind of unit....If doing only glass, you probably can afford it and can probably find the space. Before you spend a single dollar on your equipment, I suggest you take a piece of wood over to an industrial sandblaster and simply see and feel the power of the right equipment. There is NO SUBSTITUTE on this one.

Mike

[Mike Jackson]

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/wwg/pr ... ressors%2C

Erik,
Look over the specs on that group of compressors. Most of them will only go up to about 22 CFM until you get into the big boys as seen below. We had an old gasoline powered compressor I bought used at a rental center in about 1975 for around $6000. It was old then, but I think it is still working at the old shop. It looked somewhat like Larry's compressor shown above. We had to go fill it with gas each time we used it. I always thought it would be nice to just flip a switch, but when we saw the price tags for a new electric compressor capable of producing 100-150 CFM, we decided the gas machine was good enough.

3UB86
Compressor,Air,25 HP
Rotary Air Compressor, Power Rating 25 HP, Voltage Rating 200 Volts, Phase Three, Current Rating 70.3 Amps, Air Delivery 102 CFM
More Details... INGERSOLL-RAND
UP6 25 125/120-200-3 1 From mfr. w/in 11 bus. days $11,549.00

Rotary Screw Compressor,50 HP,148.5 Amps
Rotary Screw Compressor, 50 HP, Delivery 208 CFM, Pressure 125 PSI, Voltage 230, 3 Phase, 148.5 Amps AC, Mount Baseplate Type, FNPT Outlet 1 1/2 In
>More Details... INGERSOLL-RAND
UP6-50PE-125- 230-3 1 From mfr. w/in 9 bus. days $17,587.00

You just need to add up the numbers to realize how many times you can drive over to a commercial sandblast place and pay them to do it. When we lived in Oklahoma City, I let a friend blast them even when we had the equipment on many occasions. It is "fun" maybe two times. After that, it is a grungy, dirty, and potentially dangerous process that I never looked forward to doing. Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to tell you not to do this, I am only giving you some hard earned pieces of advice and some "real world" comments. I haven't blasted a single sign in 13 years and do not miss it! Personally, I'd rather have a CNC router and take Dan's Router Magic class.

[erik winkler]

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/wwg/pr ... ressors%2C

You just need to add up the numbers to realize how many times you can drive over to a commercial sandblast place and pay them to do it. Personally, I'd rather have a CNC router and take Dan's Router Magic class.

AMEN!

I think I will go for a machine that blasts the glass panels only and outsource for the wooden ones.
Still the questions remains: Should I go for the 1000 euro Nederlands cabinet with limited sized panels or should I go for the 2000 euro English cabinet with oversized panels option? What sizes of glass do you guys blast and chip?
Since Master Dave made some very nice long horizontal panels of 10 feet by 1 feet? I wonder if large size pieces of glass work is often done.
I really (at this moment) can not look into the future and figure out what size of panels I will make.
I have to rely on your advise and personal experience.

[Mike Jackson]

Get the biggest one you can afford and will handle the size jobs you anticipate doing.

Otherwise, look for one that will let you pass long glass through.

I don't think anyone here can answer that one for you.

[erik winkler]

Mike,
I am curious what sizes of glass panels you guys make.
This because I see only the little pieces made at Letterhead meets.
My overall view therefore may be distorted.

[Mike Jackson]

Erik,
If you do glass long enough, you will be asked to make panels in all sizes. I know we've done them up to 4'x8' on a few occasions, 3x6 often, and all ranges down to 12" x 12" and smaller. You might get a call for a window in front of a restaurant, a door going in, the mirror behind the bar, and so forth. If you have a blast booth that does a 2'x4' panel comfortably, you'd have a tendency to sell signs that size or smaller, or do 90% of them that size and find someone else to etch the larger ones. If you think you are going to be selling a bunch of 4'x8' panels and larger, then you need to adjust your thinking on a cabinet and think about a booth.

I've seen photos of panels Mark Oatis did for a brewery in Denver that appeared to be 8'x12'. I know we've seen a lot of Dave Smith's panels that appear to be fairly large.

Again, no one here can tell you how big the panels are going to be that you are going to sell.

[Dan Sawatzky]

Erik

Once you attend our workshop in February you will understand why I would never own a sandblast unit ever again for doing dimensional signs. If I were to do glass I might buy a small blast unit for doing just that but nothing more.

We don't do wood signs on account of their short life in the elements. And while I love the look of sandblasted redwood with the perfect grain its simply not possible to get the wood anymore.... but the good news is that by usiung texture bitmaps we can duplicate that look with the router easily. AND we have total control over depth and grain type... not to mention a thousand other things now suddenly possible in the way of texture.

Back in the early and mid 80's we purchased a big sandblast unit... but like Mike says the fun went out of the process in a big hurry. I NEVER found anyone who could do my blasting to my satisfaction so we did it for a bunch of years. Now I'm in love with 30 lb Precision Board and what we can do with a CNC router. It blows the door off of anything we could do with wood and a sandblaster. It looks just as good, lasts a LOT longer and as I type there's a piece being whittled on my MultiCam now. I won't break into a sweat for the machine is doing the bulk of the grunt work. We just do the design and fun details.

-grampa dan

[Mike Jackson]

Erik,
Just to echo what Dan said, back when we still owned Jackson Signs, we had both a CNC router and the old sandblast equipment. That was long before all the 3D carving software was available, but even then I was making the switch from sandblasted redwood signs to three dimensional signs our router could do. We still made wood panel backgrounds, but they were fabricated with tongue-n-groove wood, lap-n-gap wood, or textured with smaltz or other products. We cut letters and graphics from high density foam, and occasionally sandblasted small panels of HDU in the little booth using the glass etching system. We were well into that transition when we sold the shop and only sandblasted when we needed to match an existing sign for a new tennant in an existing building.

Quite honestly, I got really bored with a basic sandblasted sign after so many years of doing them. The CNC router gave us so much more in the department of creativity, and I never even got past the tip of the iceberg that you see Dan doing now. With that said, the good CNC routers may cost in the $60,000 range and take up quite a bit of space, so it might not be a realistic option. I haven't priced them in a long time, so I may be way off. Of all the things I miss from selling our old shop, the router is high on the list and it would have been the very first thing I bought if we had actually moved to a new place.

Based on your last post, it appears you have abandoned the chase for a wood fabricating system. Even if so, this information might help others trying to find a direction on this topic.

[erik winkler]

Those last comments really helped me in making a clear picture of the practical points to consider.
For now I will wait with the until I have vistited Dan's workshop in februari.
And probably go for the bigger unit in England. I heard the pound sterling is dropping even more in value so even good timing is important when buying this machine out of my personal pocket.
The cnc router is a realistic option for our firm, except I have to make a good business plan to present to my brother (partner) which will show him the well worth investment of the router machine and building the second floor in our shop. The business plan will be a little difficult, since the work done by Dan is soo new here and the Nederlanders (the Dutch people) do not know they can order these kinds of work. So I need to make my own market here... before my investments.

[Dan Sawatzky]

Trying to tell someone about the type of work we do is almost impossble without showing them first. The hardest question I answer is 'What do I do for a living?'

But if someone comes to our workshop or visits our website the answer is before their very eyes. They can instantly see that we do just about anything we can imagine. And we aren't short on imagination in these parts.

In a virgin market it would be tough to try and explain just what you can make for people. You have to show them. BUILD IT and they will COME!

Now I certainly don't encourage reckless spending of money or investing in equipment you couldn't make the payments on, selling this type of work without first learning how to do it and then show so you could sell is very difficult.

When we first looked at CNC routers I was amazed at just how much they would cost - especially if you added in everything, including the learning time. No small investment! But I was also just as sure that with one of these machines AND the imagination I could provide we could do stuff I could have only imagined previously. While we didn't currently do trade in the market I was sure we could capture I WAS confident we could go straight to the top once I went through the learning curve.

I was determined NOT to take on ANY work until I knew how to do the things that lived in my head. In those days the software was able, but no one was yet doing it that I could find. It was a journey of discovery. We churned out bins and bins of waste as we experimented and learned. We also created plenty of pretty neat samples for the walls, building on each succes and learning from each failure. It was three months before I even bid the first project for the router. But when I did we were already raising the bar for the industry, pioneering a whole new way to use routers. And that was only the start!

As clients came to the shop or looked at our website they could see the things we could now do. And they could get them no where else. It was an easy sell!

Did the router pay? I sold it to my partner (Janis) on the basis it would pay its own way in two years. Janis being smart insisted we finance it over FOUR years. The good news is that it paid for itself in far less than a year... because we took the time to learn and were able to do things no one else could. Now everyone else is coming up this same curve and we show them how in our workshop. But I am teaching what I learned yesterday. Today I'm busy experimenting and tomorrow I'll do the same.

If you are going to be a pioneer and leader you have to build it, then show them and they will come!

Having fun in Yarrow...

-grampa dan