Abrasive Blasting and Its Many Uses

Abrasive Blasting is more commonly known as sand blasting. It is used in various applications like cleaning dirt, grit and also rusty surfaces. Car garages often use the application for pinning the car body as its an excellent source of removing the paint and provides a good repainting surface and glass etching. The technique removes debris and grease removal in different presentations and wood shining.

Types of Abrasive Blasting

• Bead blasting: Glass beads are used to remove surface deposits for cleaning fungus,paint and calcium deposits on bathroom tiles, water tanks.
• Wheel blasting: An airless blasting technique that uses centrifugal force to clean big industrial products.
• Hydro blasting: In this method, high-pressure water jet removes paint, dust and hazardous materials. Strong detergent to the water can improve cleanliness.
• Dry ice blasting: An environment friendly technique that uses air and dry ice to chip off debris from a surface and decontaminate.
• icro-abrasive blasting: For detailed work, this dry blasting technique uses a small nozzle to abrade a targeted area.

Abrasive blasting requires you chose proper media for your surface. There are different types of media used with their benefits:

Types of Abrasive Blasting Media

• White aluminum oxide: A sharp yet gritty and hard media, it can penetrate deep into metal and cleans thick surface because of its excellent dirt cleaning property. Most often, White aluminum oxide is intended for treating surface for repainting. This abrasive has high recycle life and is a great money saver.

• Aluminum oxide grit: Grits of this media are best for preparing surface for polishing and coating. It is also used often for grinding and surface cleaning because of the rugged nature of this media. The small grits strike the area with compression and clean hard corners.
• Glass beads: Small glass media balls are user friendly because they can be reusable as much as 30 times. It is totally lead- and silica-free so environment friendly too. Glass beads are safe for surface cleaning, peening or polishing of sensitive objects such as automotive parts or moulds. They don’t cause dimensional changes but are favorite in cleaning and polishing any sort of metal.
• Corn cob grit: This is a biodegradable blast media which is used for gentle surface cleaning as it is harmless and best used for wooden surfaces, thin metals and plastics. We use it to remove surface contaminates.
• Pumice: An abrasive made from lightweight volcanic rocks that is a gentle and the softest of all the blasting media but holds good stripping power. Its used in wooden applications for polishing.
• Walnut shells: Also used for gentle cleaning without surface scratching or etching, walnut shells are ideal for polishing a surface without marring it.
• Silicon Carbide Grit: Glass is a hard material so strong blasting media is needed to etch it and silicon carbide is the hardest. It even etches stones and engraves glass. Foundry metals and steel surfaces like car accessories, bulletproof jackets are treated by this for coating preparation.
• Steel grit: This carbon steel gravels provides angular relief to metals and cleans contaminants. It is superb for surface preparation before paints and coatings.
• Steel shot: Steel shots are tiny round balls of steels good for peening applications so that a smooth and polished finish is obtained. It is recyclable up to 3000 times and offers greater compressive strength of the metal.

Abrasive media has myriad uses and it is better than manual treatment. The process is fast, very reliable and powerful. An inexpensive treatment, blasting offers great cost cutting because it efficiently cleans surfaces faster than traditional techniques. Proper temperatures and humidity levels give good outcome for a smooth operation yet safety and health security are prime to start for good performance.