Shop Tips
A chip brush can be your best friend when left inside your blasting cabinet. You can use it to brush away abrasive accumulations during the blasting operation. Try brushing the inside of the door area clean with the brush held in the blasting glove. You will minimize the mess from abrasive falling out on the floor when the door is opened. Use it to brush away the abrasive from your part as you remove it from the cabinet.
You can find this tip and many more in the shop tip discussion on the forum…
Blast Cabinet Dust Filter
When using a blasting cabinet, dust is created by the material you are blasting off of the part, as well as from the abrasive breaking down from impact. This will form a dust cloud in the cabinet and make it difficult to see. The heavier abrasive particles fall back to the bottom of the cabinet to be picked up and shot through the gun again. The lighter dust particles are best removed from the cabinet by some type of dust collection system. Blasting dust is hard on electric motors and can quickly ruin a shop vacuum. I built a water filter as a pre-filter to collect the majority of dust before it can reach my shop vacuum.
Read more on the forum…
Blast Cabinet Separator
Tinsmith
Yesterday I visited “This is the Place Heritage Park” in Salt Lake City.
On the forum I posted a few pictures from the Tinsmith’s shop.
Paint Testing
Here in the ShopNGarage lab, we have been putting Harbor Freight paint through rigorous field tests. I’ve noticed their paint doesn’t last on products that are stored outside. The picture shows a Harbor Freight trailer that I purchased about five years ago. The instructions call for the trailer to be bolted together with a bolt through the hole shown. Instead, I knocked the paint off at the seam with a stinger brush in a [DeWalt] angle grinder. I welded the seam with a MIG welder. To protect against rust, I painted the weld area with the cheap .97 cents a can ColorPlace brand spray paint from Wal-Mart. Originally, the spray paint was a fairly close match to the Harbor Freight factory paint. You can see from the picture that the factory paint has deteriorated to the point it is a light pink color and there are areas where it is has succumbed to rust. The cheap spray paint has held up pretty well. My trailer is ready for the arduous task of sanding and re-painting it. I’d have been much better off had I wiped it down with Prepsolv and shot the whole thing with the cheap spray paint when it was new.
Double Flaring
Today on the forum, you can learn to produce a double flare in tubing.
