Hey guys and gals, what size (grit) and type abrasive do you use? I'll be using this for descaling more than anything.

Depends on the metal. Then fastest cut is Black Beauty or a competing slag product.

I avoid silica because of my aversion to silicosis.

For soft metals or a smoother finish, glass beads are prefered.

Sandblasters use anything from sand (now not used because of the silica), industrial slag that has veen crushed and graded, glass beads, steel shot, corn cobs, walnut hulls, frozen carbon dioxide and the list just goes on and on, depending on the job at hand. Big sharp grit eats metal where carbon dioxide and hulls are much less abrasive. Again choose the tool that is needed to do the job.

Let me elaborate a bit. I'll be recycling the grit in a cabinet blaster, and it's going to be used 99% of the time for descaling small steel pieces.

I doubt that organic media is the way to go in this situation, but hey, what do I know.

Silica sand is out due to the above mentioned silicosis issue. Garnet is available at a pretty good price though.

I have a cabinet and I use silicon carbide in it. This media is very aggresive and will descale things well.

I use a recycling sandblaster with a fine mesh of Black Beauty. The cabinet&recycling are mandatory in my opinion. Nozzle design is extremely important for these machines because the nozzle's suction brings the Black Beauty from the hopper of the recycling part of the bag cabinet. I have found it important to use relatively little media in the recycling loop so that the stuff in the hose to the nozzle doesn't get packed full. Mine is very persnickety as compared to my outside pressurized sand blaster. Very annoying untill I learned how to "tune" it.

I have a cabinet that recycles the abrasive and has a filter. Not a HF unit. I've used plain mason's sand to glass beads in it. Mason's sand is basically good only once through, silica sand maybe twice through, other more expensive media last more cycles. I used mine mostly to clean up castings and get paint off of steel before forging, lead paint.

Keep in mind that you will need to size your nozzle according to the media that you choose.
This company offers a good selection of blasting equipment and media,Media - Abrasive Blasting

welder19

You also need to have a decent sized compressor to run a sand blast nozzle. They make all different sizes of them. The ones you get from HF are air hogs and your standard 2 to 3 HP compressor just isn't going to produce enough CFM to run the nozzle except in short bursts. When I running my cabinet I had access to a duplex 5HP compressor and it even had a hard time keeping up with demand.

Hey John. A client gave me a 5 gal pail of old glass bead. I just reuse it till it stops cutting. Will try yo stop by again.
Ken

Ken, the gas system will be down for repairs/modifications next week, so I'm not sure how much I'll be around.

Give me a buzz ahead of time. You can find my phone number and my email on my website.

Bentiron, we have a nice big compressor, no worries there.