Thread: Father's Day

For my birthday back in June, the family gave me a motorised Pressure Cleaner from Super Cheap. I don't know whether or not I needed a pressure cleaner but there you are......fast forward to 2 weeks ago. A mate asked if I could use the internet to buy an attachment that made a pressure cleaner into a wet sand blaster. He wants to clean up some steel for a project. Well the attachment turned up in the mail a couple of days ago. With the son-in-law's help we got the cleaner going and put the attachment on.....I now have to repaint a wheel on the trailer. The paint on said wheel was questionable but the sand blaster attachment took any loose paint of very quickly. I used dry beach sand and it took about 3 litres of sand to do the job. The next trial for the attachment will be to clean up the Jeep chassis (WW II). I decided to go halves with the mate to buy the attachment as it will go onto my cleaner but not the mates'

If anyone is interested, the attachment came from Able Sales


https://www.ablesales.com.au/diesel-...SACEgKq-_D_BwE

At $119 its not exactly cheap but it comes with 6 metres of hose connected to the "wand" which sucks up the sand and connects to the Pressure Cleaner via a Ryco Air Fitting. They did the sale over the phone and the delivery from Bris to country NSW was only 3 days.

***Disclaimer....I have no affiliation with Able Sales only a happy customer

So does the sand get “lost”. Or can you catch and reuse?

Yeh I should have said. The beach sand being cheap to buy I reckon that not recovering it is the go. To use garnet or some ting similar you might have to look into recovering it. I plan to wheel the chassis out of the shed and do the job under the carport. At this stage I don't know whether the sand has to be dry completely to be able to be sucked down the line to the ventury in the attachment. Doing it wet means no air born dangerous dust

I do have a small cabinet sand blaster that I trialed some time back to see how it performed on the chassis, but it was way too slow. I used the cabinet as a hopper filled with garnet and extended the delivery hose on the sand blaster gun. Using garnet recovering the medium is cost effective

Only prob I see is the possibility of "flash rust" occurring faster than with a dry blasting. Could be a bugger on some jobs.

Another problem you might have is if you are getting your sand literally from the beach it probably has salt in it. The spent sand will go onto the lawn or garden and possibly kill things and the salty water won't do good things to the steel. You may be better going to a hardware store or yard and buying fine dry sand (like they use in kid's sandpits).

Michael

Ive had a wet sandblasting attachment for about 15 years. I've only used it a few times but for occasional use it's not too bad. A few observations of mine are;

1 The sand needs to be completely dry otherwise it will clog and not free flow.
2 Packing sand or paving sand bought in 5kg bags from the hardware works OK because it's dry
3 While wet sand blasting is good because it reduces the risk of dust, it can be a messy business
4 If you are sand blasting to get an ultra-clean metal surface where you want to prevent rust, it's near impossible to achieve because the metal starts to rust almost straight away because it's already wet. Best results when done in summer.
5 re-using the sand is difficult, although not a big issue for small jobs.

Simon

Interested in how you get on with this, I just checked out a few videos on you tube and it seems to be a slow process.

Would there be anything to coat it with to stop it from rusting so quickly other than painting?

Originally Posted by Michael G

Another problem you might have is if you are getting your sand literally from the beach it probably has salt in it. The spent sand will go onto the lawn or garden and possibly kill things and the salty water won't do good things to the steel. You may be better going to a hardware store or yard and buying fine dry sand (like they use in kid's sandpits).

Michael

salt would have to be an issue
also illegal to remove sand from the beach