Bench Top Sandblasting Cabinet

I bought a sandblasting cabinet for my workbench.  Its the small one from Eastwood. It got good reviews and its probably the best priced cabinet when it goes on sale.  And from what I can tell, it goes on sale often.

The unit came shipped via Fedex and was not assembled.  It comes with a crap load of parts, and was more assembly than I thought I was going to have to do, but no worries I pulled it off.

I read the reviews, one of the biggest complaints is its not easy to seal.  After assembly you end up with a few air gaps that leak dust once it is powered up.  I made sure I used lots of the foam seal strips that come with the unit and then took the extra precaution of siliconing the corners were there were gaps.

I wanted to make sure that the vacuum was going to work well; I don't want a ton of silica dust floating around in my garage.  Since my Rigid vacuum has a different sized hose as the cabinet fixture, I picked up an adapter from Home Depot.

I paid a visit to the folks at Consolidated Compressor in Calgary and grabbed the best medium that would work with the unit.  They suggested Garnet which was reasonable at $14 for a 50 lb bag. The benefits of Garnet is that the silica levels are very low, it can be recycled, it creates less dust and it is gentle on the parts.  They also have a DIY yard where you can bring your own parts to blast.  I will be taking my larger pieces there to blast for sure.

My test piece is the brake cover from the inner fender.  Its a bit beat up, had some paint, rust and undercoater on it so I figured it was a good piece to test.

In it went and I started blasting.  I blew the fuse within 5 minutes of operating the thing.  So I ended up having to turn off all the lights in the shop.  Good thing the unit came with its own lamp.

I spent about 5 minutes on it, and it cleaned up fairly well.  The rust and paint came off no problem but the undercoater will need another treatment.

A few of the comments online suggested the attached vacuum pulled all of the sand out of the cabinet, rather than recycling the sand.  But I had no problem with that at all, in fact there was very little sand collected in the vacuum canister, mostly dust.

So there you have it, a great little unit.  And I will be sure to be blasting a bunch more Rover parts in the very near future.