You’re working on your car trying to remove paint and scaled rust, grinding and scraping years of accumulated topcoats and undercoating. The task of stripping paint and removing rust is very dirty and painstaking to say the least.
Sandblasting removes the heavy rust from frame rails, chassis underpinnings, and even engine compartments. What about the body itself, the media you used on the chassis and underpinnings is much too aggressive to use on the body panels.
This also brings up another time consuming operation, cleaning out the sandblaster and replacing the heavy blast media with a less aggressive media so that you can now strip the body panels without distorting them.
If you’re doing the work yourself, like most of us, whether it be due to lack of resources, or maybe you just want the satisfaction of saying you did it yourself. In any case, before you get started you might want to take a look at this new item put out by the Eastwood Company. It’s called a dual media blaster and it can cut your media blasting time in half. It saves you from having to change out the blast media from a lighter to heavier abrasive, or vice versa.
The Eastwood Dual Media Blast System actually has two hoppers, one for coarser abrasive’s like black beauty or aluminum oxide, and one for a lighter abrasive, such as baking soda or walnut shells etc. so essentially it saves you a lot of time, not having two separate body panels from frames, allowing you to switch on the fly from a coarse media to a much finer media.
You also have the option to integrate the two medias to form a coarser mix while blasting. It’s all controlled with Eastwood’s new patented mixing valves located in the blast nozzle. So as an example; if you’re sandblasting the firewall, you can just switch a valve and go to a less aggressive media, and continue onto a body panel without stopping. This is definitely a tool that could save lots of time throughout a restoration.