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Media Blasting

Somewhere...but you can see this was all filled in with Bondo!

- - - Updated - - -

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Hi Donny, just read through this thread. Maybe I missed it but, could you recommend a good plastic media to use and where to purchase it?

Thanks,
Chad
 
Optiblast.com is where I get mine in bulk. You have to have a lot of air to maximize plastics properties in blasting,just an fyi.
 
Donny said:
Optiblast.com is where I get mine in bulk. You have to have a lot of air to maximize plastics properties in blasting,just an fyi.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just watched your Youtube video. Looks like a ton of air. Any recommendations for a novice that wont warp panels?
 
The air is what deforms the panels, not any 'heat' per se from media blasting operations, unless the operator just holds the nozzle in one location and waits...then the metal will start behaving oddly. Recommendations? Chum up to a local media blaster, ask him if you can use his stuff for an hour and get a feel for what it's really like. You may just hire out your blasting jobs for the professional blasters to handle. But, having said that, you can get a lot of satisfaction from doing it yourself with some low-end, el cheapo sand blasting stuff from China Freight. Don't assume you're going to media blast your car with this low-end equipment unless you have 3 weeks to run your compressor at full tilt 100%, and that amount of time to waste, then you have to do the underside of the floor pans. Cheers!
 
Donny you guys earn your money. I have a blaster here in Carteret, NJ that does my work. He earns his money. Yes we haggle price to a point but unless you have a powered compressor of say 20 hp or more this is best left to the pros.
 
Where can I get 90 grit sand/silica for a good price? I wish you were closer you would have had mine under your gun. I'm using a one of those eastwood small 50# blasters... PIA ! but its all I could afford.. but the sand is $90 for 50/lbs and that hurts bad. I try and recoup it but you always loose some
 
Thanks for the info Donny and snakeoil24. I was planning on removing as much as possible mechanically and then blast what's left.
 
Question on doors - 65 B Body. After removing the door panels and getting a look inside the doors, the factory coated the lower half of the inside of the door skins with undercoating - I have no rust problems there. The upper half of the inside of the skins are showing some rust - mostly surface rust - where there is no undercoat. I'm planning on having doors blasted along with the rest of the car. Can a blaster access the inside of the door panels to get at that rust?
 
Some unsolicited well intentioned advice for the amateur restorer who does sand blasting. You must ALWAYS wear a respirator underneath your blasting hood. Not a dust mask. A full, OSHA approved , paint style , charcoal canister design respirator. Why? Simple, silica sand is a known cause of lung cancer. All bags of this type of sand now include big, dire (can cause death) warnings that were not there just a few years ago. As a long time restorer who proudly used his pressure blaster with a 3M dust mask sometimes (but not always) under the hood, I found myself with lung cancer. Never smoked in my life. After multiple lung surgeries and the help of talented doctors, I am a survivor. I am extremely lucky to be here and the doctors best guess on the causal is ...silica sand ingestion.

How do you know if you are not doing enough to protect yourself? If you are blowing your nose at the end of the work day and nasty stuff is coming out then you are ingesting bad stuff. Never use silica sand without protection. Better yet, don't use it.

If you do this every day, you should already know the risks. If you are a casual hobbyist like me, you may not be aware. It's worth an x-ray at your next check up. There are virtually no symptoms before it is too late. Survivors like me typically found out they had lung cancer by accident...for me a heart attack actually saved my life.

Think before you blast!
 
Sage advice! I use a positive pressure fed air conditioned OSHA approved helmet, oh, by the way the incoming air is filtered to breathing standards. I have a neck sock that keeps the nasty out, and cool air in. Actually, I have three helmets! Being in the helmet, I never get media snots out my nose, but, if I'm 'cleaning up' and take my helmet off for any time, yes, that's a bad idea, this is why I run 2-3 barrels of blast media in one setting, leave, shut off the equipment (because this is about 3-4 hours of work), then come back, and everything has settled by then, and reclaim the stuff into the separator where dust goes to the collector, and good media is reused. Nasty line of work for sure, but, I do what I can to keep things clean!
 
Sometimes the inner undercoating in the doors starts to come off if there's rust in there, if no rust, it's pretty stout. I'm 50% on inside the doors, mainly because my hose is so big, and, visibility is down to near zero as it's deflecting right back into my face. These are best to go in there with a scraper, do lots of hand prep work before just diving in with the blast hose.

Here's a 74 'Cuda I just finished.
IMG_00000405.jpg
 
I was wondering what the experienced media blasters out there thought of wet abrasive blasting? There is a guy by me that uses red garnet and glass (he says depending on what profile I want on the metal) and a rust inhibitor (good for 72 hours) with his wet abrasive blasting system. thanks
 
Can't say about wet abrasive systems. Most of them, and Soda blaster guys are not focused on getting the whole car done; meaning, they don't put it on a Rotisserie or get in the weeds like I do, they're just an outside spray kind of mentality, glass out? haha, nope, they ask why take the glass out, or, advertise that "You don't need to remove your glass". That argument is ridiculous. Anyways, today I was Glass Beading a bit, look at my GTX 3rd member I did today, this is bare, no paint, just blasted, and then Glass Bead blasted to shine it up.
IMG_0094.jpgIMG_0095.jpgIMG_0096.jpgIMG_0097.jpg
 
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