Well a little more work got done. As you can see from the pics on page 5 of the original both we decided it was too small and a PITA to seal the back wall around the car. So the Booth was stretched by 2 more feet wide to a total of 10 ft. Then it was lengthen to enclose the whole car. My Dad did a good job on the booth and made it modular. If we want we can unscrew a section and put the end back on to make a smaller blasting booth or painting booth. The door needs to be made up a little better and some sort of dust collection system also.
I blasted pretty much all day and learned the hard way that I should have gotten a bigger compressor. The thing just doesn't keep up. It still works fine but now I am going to sell it and get a larger one, since I have another vehicle to restore after this one. The hood I bought was basic so we made up a tube around the brim of the helmet with little holes. When blasting we hook it up to an air line and it blows cool air down around my face also keeping dust out of the hood.
I got 85% of the front end sand blasted. I just need to go back and do some touch up and the cowl too. We started with 4-50lbs bags of black blast. After all the front end blasting the sand is all pretty much shot. Towards the end it was like I was just blasting dust. We would blast the 200lbs and then sweep it all up into 5 gallon pails, then sift the sand. Worked pretty well, but really had no way to keep the dust out of the mix and it was time consuming.
The blasting really showed the few bad spots we had on the car, which isn’t too bad for being a rust belt car all its life. I will be at it again tomorrow and will be doing the inside of the firewall and finish up the other stuff I haven’t done yet.
Any tips or suggestions are always appreciated.
Lunch
