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Useful life of glass beads

gvasale

Hot Rolled
Joined
Apr 20, 2002
Location
Webster, Ma. USA
Cleaning gobs of screws in an automated Guyson t 50. Need to load an unload of course. Machine runs for 3 shifts, so it can run for 20 or so hours a day when in use.

What is the life expectancy of the glass beads under these circumstances? Using say, one bag in the hopper.

Screws are cleaned after heat treatment, oil quench and temper.
 
Apparently here appears to be some recirculating taking place. If I clean the filters, I can fill a 5 gallon pail almost 80% + to the top. Still not quite clean enough. That's at the end of a shift. So other than that, I'm wondering why I'm not pleased with how clean the screws are. No manuals on the manufacturer's website. Also, it does not always seem the beads are guaranteed to fracture.
 
IMHO Glass beads not probably aggressive enough for what your trying to do, may pay to go to a fine steel shot and just dial the pressure back to get the desired results.
 
I looked at the Guyson website. It looks as if they are more than able to solve your problem. Maybe they are only interested if you are buying a new system,or else they have concluded that you are using the wrong system and you wont listen to their advise.Cleaning a bunch of screws and bolts ought to be a piece of cake in comparison to some of the other parts that are shown on their site.Or maybe they are just blowing smoke,it does happen. Good luck Edwin Dirnbeck
 
It sounds like you are getting good beads all the way into the filter? That shouldn't be happening. Do you have a reclaimer in the system? It does a good job of collecting the beads and allowing only the dust into the filter bags.

Dust Collector Stand Alone Abrasive Reclaimer - TP Tools & Equipment

Also, with that kind of use you need to change nozzles on a daily basis I guess. Wallowed out nozzles produce poor results.

Dennis
 
This is where all blasters are not created equal. The Uni-Hone used to have a very good system of sifting the fines out of the beads, so that you got a lot more life. Then you only had to make up the beads that were totally dusted, not all of them.

^ Oops, hit send too late, I came in second :) The Uni-Hone has a great big huge-ass dust filtering system tho, even bigger than the one mentioned above. And a vibrating grate to sift them inside the cabinet. Helps a lot.
 
The first thing to do is look at the beads in the cabinet and the trap with a microscope and see how well it separates the good beads from the broken ones. If you do it right, you should have few good beads discarded and almost all fractured ones removed. Many years ago I made a separator that worked like a cyclone separator and gave almost perfect performance. It works on the difference in aerodynamic drag of a smooth sphere and a fragment. Much of the separation was achieved by the air flowing up a not quite vertical tube with the airflow adjusted to keep the fragments airborne and the beads falling back. Unfortunately, the setup had to go to make room for other things and I didn't keep any drawings, but I recall that the final separation was done by a tilted duct with the lower part of it blanked off at the top. The lighter and aerodynamically poor fragments remained airborne and passed out above the barrier while the good beads fell to the bottom of the stream, hit the barrier, and slid back down.

I know nothing about your system but remember that a typical sandblast cabinet comes with a general purpose system that may be used for coarse grit not be optimized for finer beads.

The fracture rate of beads is controlled by pressure and the angle they strike the surface.

Bill
 
Have you looked at a different abrasive ?

There are several kinds of plastic abrasive now
on the market.

Some from thermoset plastic, and
some from thermoplastic materials.

I came across one automated machine, that was running
a plastic abrasive that look like "Tide" washing powder.
 








 
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