More time than money: building a sandblaster.

While I'm preparing for the next stage of the 1989 rebuild, I decided to upgrade my shop equipment and turned an empty propane tank into a gravity fed sandblaster. I had to buy the dolly, plumbing fittings, and hoses. So I have about $100 in this.

Here is the entire setup. The tank has pins welded to the side that drop into tubes on the dolly so I can pull it apart if I need to.


The idea is that the sand will fall out of the tank and will sit in the trap. As the air passes over it (right to left in this picture) the sand will get pulled out of the trap and through the gun.
On the pipe to the right I have a valve to adjust the amount of air that bypasses the trap. The more air going by the less sand being pulled in and vice versa.



I also added a debris shield / dust collector. It works amazingly well and allows me to sandblast in safety googles and a face mask. It doesn't do much for collecting the media to reuse, but I can vacuum it up, sift it out and reuse what I can.


And of course I made two videos about it! Go check them out!
https://youtu.be/d_kkoLu9e4Q
https://youtu.be/vQbNwoNErZw

 

How much time ??

 

It probably took about 8 hours to put it all together. Buy it took a couple days figuring out the design and layout and then 5 hours to print the collector. So in total probably 20 hours total for design, manufacturing and testing.

 

So if your labor rate is $50.00 per hour about $1100.00 total?

 

@BartMaster1234

 

If you want to look at it this way, yes $1150.00 for the setup. Though this logic is severely flawed because I wasn't treating this as a billable project so my "design time" wasn't set to "efficient" it was set to "working in my garage on my own stuff". If someone asked me to make this for them the break down would be something like:

Cad work for the collector = 2 hours @ $65
Printing the part = $50 said and done
Materials = (what did I say) $30 in plumbing and other stuff?
Manufacturing = 3 hours of cutting, welding, drilling assembling @ $35 an hour.
And add a little buffer in case something goes wrong.

Total would be around $350. The rates above are my actual engineering rates for my company. I also wouldn't be making a video of it so I'd be working much more efficient. And you can't really look at it as a $350 sandblaster, you'd have to look at it as $350 custom tooling that you're having me design and make because nothing on the market meets your needs.

 

Very cool & clever! Nice job.

 

If you come pick it up or have it shipped, I have a real abrasive blast pressure pot you can have. I took it off my Econoline cabinet because I went back to siphon feed.