Grit blasting epoxy, carbon fibre and titanium in one cabinet?

[David Churcher]

Good morning all,

I'm after some advice if anybody can help?

With a wet grit blaster, is it OK to mix epoxy/carbon fibre parts and titanium in the same cabinet?

Would it be best practice to do a complete machine clean down with media replacement between blasting different materials, due to contamination?

Or would you just keep the two materials apart in seperate cabinets? I.e. One cabinet for the carbon fibre, and one for the titanium?

What about if you had a part that was carbon fibre, aluminium and titanium, and wanted to surface prep this part in its entirety?

For information - the media is aluminium oxide

Many thanks

[Gordon]

Hi David

to the Surface Engineering Forum.

Best practice is to keep things separate, but that is not always practical.

Depends somewhat on what you are going to do with the blasted surfaces afterwards. If higher degree of surface cleanness is required, then a higher degree of grit blasting cleanness will be required.

[MichiganMan]

I would expect that you will be fine keeping all of them in the same cabinet.

As Gordon mentioned, it would be theoretically ideal to have them all seperated, but it is likely to be wildly impractical. We have a blast room for large pieces at one of my facilities that routinely processes parts made of aluminum, steel, stainless, iron and various grades of bronze. In addition, some of the pieces come in with powder coat, CARC or other coatings on them that need to be stripped. In the last 5 years we have had fewer than 5 projects that required a special cleanout. There have been zero production defects during this same time frame resultant from cross-product contamination. As long as you keep up the maintenance on the unit and monitor the size/cleanliness of the media properly it won't cause a problem 99.9% of the time.