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Top 5 Hand Tool Every Blaster Should Have In His Tool Box
Why use a Bristle Blaster?
The best coatings deserve the best surface preparation and the bristle blaster is designed to remove coating, to remove scale, to remove corrosion, impart a profile, give you a abrasive quality / near white surface clean. With a 2-3mil or 50-75microns profile which is typical when abrasive blasting. The Bristle Blaster does not remove metal, it’s not a grinder, and it’s not going to polish. It will rearrange the metal on the surface and that’s how it creates the profile.
When to use a Bristle Blaster
Use a bristle blaster for surface preparation when you cannot use abrasive products, when its it’s not feasible, it’s not safe, or it’s too expensive to do abrasive blasting. The biggest markets that we see are in plant construction where there are a lot of weld joints that need cleaning before painting. Other applications are any steel surface prep applications, spot repairs, welding preparation, underlaying solutions, corrosion, uneven surfaces, angles etc.
When to use each one – what tool do I use?
We have 3 main tools: electric, pneumatic and battery powered.
What do all 3 have in common?
- Weight is comparable
- Production rate and performance is going to be virtually the same– typically we see around 12-15 square feet per hour
- The tools are warrantied for a full year
ELECTRIC TOOL
The electric Bristle blaster is the cheapest of these three and the most common. If you were going to use the tool for 10 hours a day, doing work where you have power available we strongly recommend the electric version
PNEUMATIC TOOL
Typical applications for Pneumatic is your ATEX and class 1 div 1 locations? The Pneumatic tool is fully approved, and the sparks have been verified to be cold sparking. You can also use the pneumatic tool with the vacuum adapter, which enables you to capture about 95% of what’s coming off the surface. So, it’s great for containment, lead based paints and sensitive machinery areas, pneumatic is the way to go for that.
BATTERY TOOL
We recommend the cordless tool in the obvious situations where you don’t have access to power, or access to air. It’s main use is for smaller projects where you’re going to be in and out relatively quickly, like when you need to do a small amount of touch up. It’s a tool that every crew should have on their jobsite. Its as handy as a battery drill.
A less common scenario, but a valuable one is doing spot repairs on a structure like a wind tower or an off-shore platform. A job where you’re cleaning for 10 minutes, you’re priming and then you’re coating all in one trip down the rope.
If it’s long continuous work, you’re probably going to be better suited with the pneumatic or the electric version.
BATTERY LIFE
A common question is battery life: 20-25 minutes off an 8-amp hour battery, and the rapid chargers will charge a dead battery in approximately an hour. We recommend having two batteries, so that one can always be charging while you’re using the other battery for work.
