??? for people with bead blast cabinets.....

Hey gang,

Ok, finally have the air supply to properly use my home brewed blasting cabinet. Only trouble is that the "window" didn't really last all that long. It's a piece of lexan, and it didn't survive more than a couple hours of blasting before it was nearly opaque. This is despite being careful to not give the window any direct shots. Could barely see what I was doing near the end. Anyhow, I can't complain, the lexan was free, but now I'm contemplating upgrading to glass. Before I make this effort, I was hoping some of you could give your experiences. I'm hoping that glass, being as hard as the glass beads, will survive better without "fogging" up as long as I don't give it any direct blasts.

Any thoughts?

 

Yeah, don't kid yourself! Real glass hazes over mucho faster than you'd think! Ever seen designs that have been etched into glass with a blaster?

Might turn the air pressure down some, only have it as strong as you need it to minimize glass damage from media whizzing around in there. And I don't think they use regular window glass in those things, for safety reasons.

 

Bill, my cabinet has a glass window in it that lasted many hours of blast time. When I finally had to replace it, I put a piece of metal window screen in front of it. This screen deflects a fair amount of the media before it ever hits the glass. Glass is the way to go in my opinion.

 

Howard is right use the mylar sheeting in front of the lexan. Thats the way a big sandblast unit is made, ares here at work does not go on with sticky tape, you pull the window frame wing nuts off, lift out the lexan and put the mylar down then put it all back together.

 

Cover the window with strips of duct tape that overlap about 1/2 and rip off a strip when it gets fogged

 

What McRuff said. One of the other things I've noticed that fogs the glass up real quick is holding the part up close to the glass while blasting it. Don't do that. The ricochet will fog the glass just as if you were aiming the nozzle at it. Hold the parts as far away as reasonable to keep this from happening. I've found that the glass will last much longer than lexan though, and if you put the mylar in front of it should last a very long time. We use that at work. We don't use regular glass though, we use laminated safety glass so if there is breakage there is less chance of someone getting hurt. Nickmil.