blasting cabinet help

Long time reader, first time poster......

Just purchased an imported blasting cabinet secondhand, (was never used). Siphon fed type. No garnet is being sucked up the hose and coming out the end of the gun. Some garnet is blowing out the seams of the cabinet itself ? Shouldnt the cabinet be fully sealed. I dont have a dust extraction unit connected as of yet. It looks like the garnet is blowing back out the suction tube which goes to the bottom of the cabinet. Any idea's.....


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You have the wrong or partially plugged nozzle. Or the abrasive has eroded the "siphon chamber" in the head of the unit, I have to replace mine quite often. The siphon head type units are basically all the same. The better units are hardened steel or ceramic. I usually use the "blast from a bucket" type nozzles, they are cheap and available from any tool/swap vendor for less than $8.00

Could be a number of reasons. If the sand has gotten damp from drawing moisture (high humidity) it will not work correctly. Check to make sure that you are not losing air somewhere in the line before the nozzle. Also try holding your hand. (with heavy gloves of course) over the nozzle, pull the trigger and see if it will blow back thru to the hopper. Another thing you can do is reduce the amount of sand you have in the cabinet. Depending on the type...and you say it is an import.... if you have an over abundance of sand the weight along with any moisture, might keep it from feeding into the hopper. We had problems with a blast cabinent at work that did that. We reduced the quantity of sand by 50% and it worked great.

Kevin

The only way to seal the cabinet, you'll have to take it apart and use some type of rubber. I tried siliconing the seams but that felled. So, I took the cabinet apart and used rubber garrment like a rubber garment that you would use to seal a camper shell to the bed of a pick up. After awhile, I got tiried of the small space and decided to built a bigger blasting cabinet. As for the other problem. You might have sand clogged in the head of the gun. Take the gun apart and clean out the wet sand. If you are going to use this blast cabinet for awhile. I would invest in a carbide nozzle. The link below is the company that I buy my parts from. Being over-sea's, they would still ship to you. Just one carbide nozzle will last years of use. But, you will have to purchase the gun that the nozzle fits.

http://www.trinco.com/leftframe1.htm

By the way, do you have a link so that we could see the cabinet that you have? Is this cabinet red and have a flexi-glass top? If so, that is the one I had which I have scrapped. Was only big enough to blast a small rim and still I couldn't get it totally blasted. The cabinet I'm working on now is big enough to blast a door, fender, bumper and even a rear end. Hopefully, I'll get it done one of these days.

You might think about a shop vac to help keep the dust clear while you are blasting. There about a $130US and they last forever. Mine is 6hp 22 gallon shop vac.

http://rewci.com/shvaccosewev.html