Sand/walnut blasting

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Tsuswimming

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Aug 28, 2010
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Location
Fredericksburg, VA
Hi all i'm fairly new to these forums and they are great for information, and am currently working on a mod of my own, will post it up soon, but my problem is:

I have a air compresser usually runs about 60-90 psi. Max it can run is 125 psi. Can rent a bigger one if thats the problem.
I bought a cheap sandblaster at harbor freight for like 10 dollars. Running speed is 75 psi and the max is 150 psi.
I also bought 24 grit walnut shells 25lb bag. At harbour freight for like 20 dollars.
So it is not removing the paint nor coming close not even making scratches in the paint, i was wondering if its my air compresser or sand blaster i need to upgrade on or are the walnut shells to fine or should i get sand also should i get a bigger air compresser?
Any and all help will be appreciated and also like i said i will be posting my mod soon.
 
:WELCOME:

I don't have any experience with the media blasters. Why are you wanting to remove all the paint? Sounds like it's on there pretty good.
 
yea, its on there good, removing it to repaint it its got 3 coats 2 paints and a primer, paints came off alright with aircraft stripper but i ran out of it and just thought ehh might as well pay 30 bucks to try the walnut stuff. But ofcourse it dosn't work :mrgreen: . So im just trying to find out what the problem is if its the compresser the walnut or the gun itself. And thanks for the welcome. =p if u have any other ides on how to remove, that would be greatly appreciated.
 
blasting needs alot of CFM. The other day a car show had a media blaster 'soda' blasting an old truck being made into a hot rod. The blaster used a tow-behind compressor providing 250CFM, that is alot!
 
Its not the pressure as much as the volume of air that a sand blaster uses.I use soda when I sand blast outboards when I'm fixing one up.It takes the paint off but you still have to scotch brite the oxidation off.Sand would be too coarse I think.I have a 2 stage air compressor that runs with a 5 horse & I can blast for about 5 minutes than I have to let the compressor catch up.I usually start with 175 # & when I get down to 100 # I stop.
 
The gist of it is the stripper is much better for large areas of aluminum. Say you want to clean up a carb or outboard then shells would work great. Sand and aluminum don't work to well, the sand embeds in the aluminum and most paints don't stick to well and the sand hitting the aluminum heats it up and it's prone to warping.

Jamie
 
I used the stripper and it was very easy. It helped for me to cover with plastic after applying a coat to hold moisture in. Then # 3 steel wool.
 
Tsuswimming said:
ok, so im better off just going with the stripper?

I think that's right. I just finished stripping a 14' runabout with stripper and it's pretty obnoxious stuff but did a good job. What I learned along the way, as Ranchero suggests, is that sandblasting will distort the aluminum either with the heat generated by blasting or the air pressure needed to remove the paint. Imagine having to re-buck every rivet on the boat because the aluminum has distorted during the sand blasting. No thanks. When I took mine to the blaster they suggested soda blasting but at $250/hour I declined. I've used less than $40 worth of stripper and about 8 hours total and it came out fine. Be sure to cover up (long sleeves, good rubber gloves and full-face protection) or that stripper will do a number on your skin and unless you've got a big reserve of brain cells, use a respirator.
 
I sand blasted my hull with the finest sand I could find. I dont have anything embedded in the hull and I dont have any warped aluminum. IMO sandbalsting is by far the best method if you have access to the proper equipment. Aluminum is a very soft metel so obviously if you spent a bunch of time in one area it could cause problems but you will have no problems at all if you use a little common sence when you do it. By the way, I stripped the entire hull to bare aluminum in about 15 minutes!! It had 3 layers of paint on it.
 
Tsuswimming said:
Hi all i'm fairly new to these forums and they are great for information, and am currently working on a mod of my own, will post it up soon, but my problem is:

I have a air compresser usually runs about 60-90 psi. Max it can run is 125 psi. Can rent a bigger one if thats the problem.
I bought a cheap sandblaster at harbor freight for like 10 dollars. Running speed is 75 psi and the max is 150 psi.
I also bought 24 grit walnut shells 25lb bag. At harbour freight for like 20 dollars.
So it is not removing the paint nor coming close not even making scratches in the paint, i was wondering if its my air compresser or sand blaster i need to upgrade on or are the walnut shells to fine or should i get sand also should i get a bigger air compresser?
Any and all help will be appreciated and also like i said i will be posting my mod soon.


I use walnut to polish pistol brass in a tumbler, I would think you would need something a little more abrasive to remove paint. We used to use Glass bead to remove paint from cars and frames, low pressure home owner style air compressor with a gravity style blaster and it worked fine.
 

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