Since I'm at the stage where I have to clean and blast a lot of parts with my blast cabinet, I figured a good tune up was in order. First, I needed a new dust trap for my cabinet so that my shop vac motor wouldn't get burned out by the blast media. I had built this "quick and dirty" model several years ago, but unfortunately I ran over the damn thing with my truck a few weeks ago.
Some of you guys might want to build one yourself -- or take the basic idea and mod it up more elegantly than me.
I all starts with a new 5 gal. bucket and air tight lid from Tractor Supply ($6.00)
Take the lid and with a hole saw make two 1" holes on opposing sides. Then use a razor knife to gently enlarge the holes to accept 1" PVC screw pipe couplings -- you'll need two coupling. Push the male portion through the lid and then attach the female end from underneath.
Make sure that the couplings are air tight through the lid. This is what you wind up with ---
Next cut a piece of 1"' pipe long enough to extend down into the bucket and allow a clearance of about 2" from the bottom.
On the other coupling just install a short piece of 1" pipe to allow for a 90 degree elbow to fit.
You're done!!!
Now --- fill the bottom of the bucket with 2" of water, put the lid on the bucket and hook up your shop vac to the short side (the one with the elbow). Take another vac hose (yes you need two vac hoses) and attach it to the coupling with the long extension. You've now created a high speed water trap!!
The dust will be drawn by the vac into the bucket and because it's moving so fast, will get trapped in the water. The elbow fitting acts as a bafffle to make sure that no splashing water in the bucket makes it into your clean shop vac hose.
This is what my setup looks like -- I pulled all the components from under the bench so you could see them. Normally all this spaghetti is hidden well out of the way.
.... and after blasting for half an hour you can see the crap that accumulated in the water. No dust makes its way into the motor -- that's good because blast media dust will kill a shop vac very quickly.
A word about blast media. I've used a lot of different stuff over the years, but have found that for general cleaning nothing beats the price and cutting action of Tractor Supply's "Black Diamond" 20/40 grit media. It's $7.95 for a 50lb. bag -- you can't argue with that price. It's supposed to be used with a pressure blaster, but this small grit size is perfect for quick cleaning in a standard siphon feed cabinet.
How does it work? This rear end cover was full of rust and scale. Within 10 minutes, it looked like this -- ready for paint!!
Also, this is a cheap HF style cabinet kit that has a lot of open seams once it's assembled. To seal all those seams air tight, I used a can of brush on Truck Bedliner. This stuff is tough and only costs a few dollars for a quart. You can get it at your local auto parts store. Ther is no dust leakage from this cabinet once the seams are brushed with this material -- it's tight.
Here is what the truck bedliner paint looks like, once it's painted on the inside cabinet seams --
Good luck -- hope some of this info is useful. :thumbsup:
