The Big Blowoff
Clearing piles of accumulated blast media - and cleaning residual dust from the workpiece - can be a backbreaking and time consuming chore. Last year, I worked with a military base to incorporate a powerful blowoff nozzle that does the job quickly and effectively. After using it for more than one year, base personnel report that they love it.
This customer purchased a very large industrial walk-in blast room from me, which they use for camouflage changeover and general vehicle sandblasting. They loved the blast room, but hated the clean up. With the Big Blowoff, they can now remove large volumes of spent garnet abrasive from their sandblasted vehicles and get it into the room's automated media recovery troughs for reuse in just minutes using the large volume of compressed air at hand.
The high volume of air cleans all freshly blasted surfaces – even hard to reach areas – and helps get the vehicle into the paint shop right away, before air and moisture can adversely affect the application of primer and paint.
The upgrade features a lightweight hose and nozzle, and a high volume air valve that is triggered by a standard deadman on-off switch. Per OSHA regulations, the large blowoff nozzle is fitted with a relief device that drops the pressure if the flow is dead ended.
The Big Blowoff replaced a Remote Abrasive Cutoff (RAC) switch; a device that deactivates the blast machine's abrasive valve to supply compressed air (only) to the blast nozzle. (Normally, the RAC is considered a nice upgrade, though it adds weight that the operator needs to carry, and complexity to the system controls.)
If you would like to get pricing on this upgrade, contact me. I'm always responsive to making blasting operations work better for my customers.
© 2015 Mark Hanna, BlastPrep.com
