How Does Abrasive Blasting Work?
Abrasive blasting is known as a number of other different names such as wet blasting, media blasting, vapour blasting, slurry blasting and dustless blasting. These are all terms used to describe this form of surface preparation which is different to sandblasting.
Wet Abrasive Blasting ProcessAbrasive blasting works by abrasive inside a blast tank and introducing water into the blasting procedure. This drastically increases the mass and energy the blast tank puts out, while reducing the amount of dust that regular sandblasting would produce.
A great description of how this works would be to compare throwing and handful of dry sand to throwing a handful of wet sand. The wet sand would impact the surface with more force and will not disintegrate into a cloud of dust on impact like dry sand would.
Wet abrasive blasting works on the same principal. By adjusting the air pressure and the abrasive and water mixture, allows the operator to remove stubborn surface material or carefully remove surface material from delicate surfaces.
So how does the abrasive blasting process help you?
- It’s a much faster process – With wet abrasive blasting, we can strip a vehicle in under 2hrs depending on the surface material.
- Leave less mess – Water encapsulates the abrasive material, which minimises the amount of dust we produce however we do use containment procedures to clean up after ourselves.
- Different abrasive material – As long as it sinks in water we can use any kind of abrasive material for the best possible surface finish.
- Minimal warping – Water prevents friction and unlike sandblasting, our blasting method will not warp metal through the production of heat from friction, however the pressure from the blast nozzle could warp metal that does not have sufficient support structures in place which is why care is need in blasting certain surface types.
- No flash rusting – We use Holdtight 102 Rust Inhibitor in both our blasting procedure and our wash down at the end which decontaminates metal leaving a clean, chloride free paint ready surface for approximately 72hrs. We do however highly recommend priming the surface area as soon as possible after the blasting process has taken place to further prevent flash rusting.
