Question about sand blaster PSI?

[jjlaughner]

I have a sand blaster I bought from a garage sale. Its a gravity feed Craftsmen, pistol grip with trigger, 5gallon tank, and it has some course grain white sand in it.
I was blasting away today at about 65-70 PSI and it was dooing pretty good, up'd to 80 and of course it works better and uses about twice the sand.
Does anyone else use a sand blaster? what PSI you run them at? I am definatly buying a blasting box of some sort soon!

 

[Stomper]

I blast at 80 psi. But on my blaster I can adjust the sand flow.

 

[TONYP]

we have the kind at work here...must blast at 150psi cause it blow your hand back when you step on the air... /forums/images/graemlins/thumb.gif

 

[gravdigr]

I'm a professional sandblaster. I carve granite monuments (headstones). A couple things you need to think about are nozzle size and compressor output. We use a 3/16" nozzle orifice for the small blast cone. Sandblasters for doing metal work like car frames and sich can use up to 1/2" but need massive airflow. We use a lindsay 125cfm compressor pushing 100psi. We can go higher but it tends to burn the rubber stencil. If you blast in a place that you can recover your media I suggest using no1 dry crushed silica sandblasting sand. It's what we use and I can get a good 10-20 reuses out of it, granted when it gets turned to powder it is sucked out our exhaust system so I don't have to deal with the sand when it is unusable i just add new.

here is my 1,000lb sandblaster in the background
http://community.webshots.com/scripts/editPhotos.fcgi?action=showMyPhoto&albumID=73097086&photoID=73098363&security=mvtXNV

this is a smaller blaster (on the right) that we use steel bead media with.
http://community.webshots.com/scripts/editPhotos.fcgi?action=showMyPhoto&albumID=73097086&photoID=73098401&security=bhsHaY

and this is the compressor we use.
http://community.webshots.com/scripts/editPhotos.fcgi?action=showMyPhoto&albumID=73097086&photoID=73098423&security=lauoTR