How To Maintain an Efficient Blast Media Work Mix
Do you get inconsistent surface finishes when sandblasting? You may be forgetting to check your work mix.
If you are reclaiming and reusing your sandblast media, then you need to be aware of what a good sandblast media work mix is and how to maintain it. Having too coarse or too fine of a work mix can cause inconsistent or damaged surface finishes. The best way to ensure a consistent and quality surface finish is through maintaining a healthy blast media work mix.
Signs of A Bad Work Mix
Process is moving slowly
A proper work mix contains a mixture of various sized abrasives. This distribution of sizes provides for maximum cleaning in the shortest amount of time.
There is a lot of dust in your process
The fine dust particles are not being pulled out by the reclaimer/dust collector properly.
Inconsistent Surface Finish
Benefits Of Using An Efficient Healthy Work Mix
- Increase the value of your sandblasting media by making it work as efficiently as possible.
- Consistent and quality surface finish.
- Increase productivity through a quicker surface finishing process.
How To Achieve & Maintain An Efficient Work Mix
Monitor your work mix through regular screening
There are a lot of factors that cause a media to break down quickly or slowly such as the type of abrasive used, the starting particle size and PSI used while blasting. Since there can be many factors that affect the rate of media breakdown, it is a good idea to regularly screen your media so you can tell where your system stands. This is turn will help you make adjustments that will provide a consistent quality finish.
If you don’t have screening capabilities, we can help at our lab at Midvale Industries.
Regularly add new media to the mix
Frequently adding small media additions will keep larger particles fed into the system to replace the spent media that is being removed. The amount of blasting you do per day will help determine how frequently you should add new media.
Adding a large amount of new media at the end of the current media cycle will throw off your work mix. This creates an inconsistent mix and results.
Check your dust collector
If you find usable media in the dust collector, make adjustments to the reclaimer and/or dust collector that will dampen the system and stop pulling good media through.
Is there dust in your work mix?
Then it’s time to adjust the reclaim/dust collector system the opposite way and pull spent media and other dusts out of the system.