Blasting

Floor space, clear height, access, foundation, power and dust filtration — the checklist we work through with every customer, written down once.

Stainless steel is not stainless because it is made of a metal that does not rust. It is stainless because it contains at least 10.5% chromium, and that chromium forms a thin, invisible, self-repairing oxide film on the surface — the passive layer. As long as that layer is intact and has access to oxygen,

Abrasive is not consumed hitting the part. It is consumed on the way back. In a closed machine, every grain passes through the circuit hundreds of times before it leaves — and what decides whether it leaves after a hundred passes or after three hundred is not the wheel. It is the separator. It is

A wheel blast machine has no compressor, no nozzles and no operator getting tired by the end of the shift. What it does have, more than any air blast setup, is parts that wear by design. The wheel throws metallic abrasive at high speed for hours on end, and everything that abrasive touches gets consumed

The blast machine is the second purchase. The first one, and the one most often got wrong, is the compressor. Not because it is hard to choose, but because it gets chosen on price and motor power, and blasting asks for neither. It asks for a given flow at a given pressure, held steady, with

rticle EN Title: Blasting nozzles: how long they last and how to tell when one is worn Slug: blasting-nozzles-wear-replacement Meta description: The nozzle is the cheapest part in the installation and the least monitored. How it wears, how to measure it, and why a worn one costs you electricity. Category: Blasting A nozzle costs about

A surface can be clean to SA 2.5 and still fail to hold paint. It happens more often than it should, and the cause is almost always the same: the preparation grade was specified and the profile was forgotten. What the profile actually is Every particle that strikes the surface leaves a mark. Millions of

In dry blasting, the abrasive is accelerated by compressed air or by a wheel. In wet blasting, it is carried by a pressurised water jet. Changing the medium changes the character of the process completely. What it does differently Dust leaves the equation. Water binds the fine particles. There is no dust cloud, and therefore

Before choosing the abrasive, establish what you are using it for. There are three different purposes, and they ask for different things. Surface cleaning — removing oxides, foundry sand, burrs. The most frequent case. Cutting — applied for example to granite blocks, with special mixes of hard shot. Etching — done to increase surface adhesion

Rust grades A to D and preparation grades St2, Sa2, Sa2½ and Sa3 in plain terms: what each one demands, which gets specified in practice, and why hand cleaning ends up costing more.