How To Sandblast Extremely Tight Spaces

Take a look at these photos. This is from a real jobsite challenge one of our customers was facing. Everything you see in this photo needed to be blasted.

First, to give some perspective of this challenge, the picture is looking downward… into a chamber with the bottom floor about 12 feet deep. Second, this chamber is just one of about 8 chambers that extend side-by-side for about 18 feet. Each chamber is approximately 30 inches wide… and the channel divisions within each chamber have 8-10 inches gaps between the walls. Obviously not much room to work. And finally, this cross pipe – how do we blast the bottom side of this thing?

The least desirable way to blast this area would be to simply blast downward into the chamber and hope the ricocheting media particles eventually hit all the areas equally and provide a consistent clean profile. Probably NOT going to happen.

Well, no worries because we sell a special blast nozzle whose sole purpose is to make these challenges easy for you.  We recommend a Quad Outlet Angled Nozzle – offering two forward blasting 60-degree outlets and two backward blasting 120-degree outlets. This is a great nozzle for hard-to-negotiate tight spaces.

So, the next question is… how do you feed this nozzle into the chamber to cover the 12-foot depth?

Our client actually fitted a similar nozzle to a steel pipe – creating in effect – a multi-foot long nozzle, that was then attached to a 1-inch blast hose. This gave them the control and rigidity needed to maneuver between the channels as well as get the under-side of the pipe. It was a creative and successful solution to the problem.