- 7,716
- 19,765
- 113
- Location
- Charlotte NC
.Apparently, the guy who helped me by taking some of the pieces to his work has several blasters available there. 2 are cabinets that are big enough to get these pieces in and one is a "room" that has some kind of conveyor / auto-feed system that recycles the media. I think they are using aluminum oxide as media. But yes, the blaster I rented had a ~1" nozzle with a 184 cfm, diesel compressor and it was great while I had it but even with a 1" nozzle, with the thickness of the paint, it would have taken FOREVER to blast that much surface area simply because you had to do it inch by inch and it was taking 30 seconds to a minute for it to eat through the paint in each 1 inch circle. The guy who helped me out resorted to several different methods after realizing what he got himself into. He threw a couple of the heavy pieces made of channel into a fire and burned most of the paint off. On some of the bigger panels made of sheet metal, he buried them in paint stripper and covered them with visqueen to keep them wet and left them for days. I had to go over every piece with my blaster and clean them up but he saved weeks - probably months of work. Pieces that didn't have layers and layers of paint on them were pretty easy. Even with my blaster. I did the 2 side panels of the fan shroud the other day. Doing both side of each panel took only a few minutes because I was able to back away from the panel with the blaster nozzle so it was probably hitting 3-4 square inches at a time and I was able to move the nozzle back and forth at a pretty fast speed. It was almost like wiping the paint away with a rag.
Anyway, thanks to him, it's all done now. I've had that compressor for about 4 years now and when I started the blasting part of this project it only had about 6 hours on it - and I had used it to blast several times on other projects.. It's got over 20 hours now.
Wow!! That is pretty amazing! Yeah, the one at the monument place has a 1" hose feeding it and that volume of air is pretty amazing compared to my toy blaster