Hi guys and gals,
For a variety of reasons, it has been a while since I have been able to do
anything on the Scout Car project but the down time has been filled with
making connections, tracking down parts and (my favorite) tool acquisition.
Far better than sitting on my hands and doing nothing at all.
Today I finally got to try out my new blasting cabinet, having obtained it
more than two weeks ago (shows you how things can be around here). I really
didn't expect to accomplish much today but I really only wanted to fire it
up and try it on for size anyway.
It operates best at 100psi (for you technophiles, I have no idea what CFM I
am running, but what the hell, it works) and uses any media (I am using
black beauty at the moment because I wanted a little more cutting power at
the lower psi). I had some misgivings about part of the design but buying
locally I had only two to choose from. The manufacturer is Cyclone Blasting
Systems. The cabinet is some type of space-age plastic, 3 feet wide, 2 feet
deep and 16 high in the front and 23 inches high in the back. The cabinet
comes with a siphon-feed gun, several tips, stainless steel grate and
ceramic socket with external switch for a standard light bulb. The pickup
tube for the gun simply lays in the bottom of the cabinet which is funnel
shaped to cause to media to settle back to the lowest point in the bottom
where it is recycled. The cabinet will accept a full 80 pound bag of media
with some room to spare.
One of the problems I have with this cabinet is that the passive venting
system at the rear of the cabinet is inadequate for the amount of pressure
entering the cabinet. As such, the rather porous foam seal around the
observation port (which does double duty as a top-loading door) leaks
pulverized media near one's face. Luckily I had suspected that this would
be the case and have obtained a fitting to permit me to connect my shop vac
to the cabinet. By porting the fitting between the cabinet and the vac I
should be able to control how much internal cabinet air the shop vac draws
so as not to haul out a great deal of reusable media.
The other problem is that the observation window is plexiglas with a
replacable self-sacrificing clear mylar sheet. The pupose for the mylar
sheet is to save the more expensive plexiglas because after a while the
viewport will cloud from being blasted by rebounding media and prevent the
user from being able to see what is going on in the cabinet (a problem I
found to be compounded by pulverized media lollygagging about in the air
inside the workspace....one more reason to hook up the shop vac). I must
say I wanted to have the viewport more vertical earlier today as the
sunlight overhead made for a glare that was impenetrable. So, having a the
viewport too close to the action (where it gets blasted) and at the wrong
angle, the obvious solution is to create a hood the fits the cabinet's top
opening and moves the plexiglas up and away from the action and makes it
more vertical so that glare is not such a problem. The manufacturer really
missed the boat on that one. Perhaps they felt it would cause shipping
problems or make their product too pricey. Who knows.
Other than these two things, and accepting the limitations of the equipment
and the lower psi it operates at, I found the blasting cabinet to be the
cat's meow. Now anytime I have a few free minutes, with no real set up or
clean up, I can wander out to the shop, select a likely part and clean it up
without any real difficulties. Hooray!
Regards,
TJ Smith
MVPA 21162
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 06 2002 - 11:49:24 PST