I have dry blast cabinets and understand these are for light finishing opps, in general shop use when and where is this a preferred process.
I had a pretty big Hydro-Hone for several years. It's a love-hate relationship ....
On non-ferrous materials, the finish is superb, far better than dry blasting. It makes stuff beautiful.
Also, the beads form a slurry in the hopper which is pumped up to the nozzle - there's none of that siphon stuff. When you blast wet, you're
blasting. You gotta hang onto the parts, it's like a water hose with pretty good pressure. It doesn't take off a lot of metal, like silicon carbide does, but it's no slouch at removing crud.
Except you don't want to remove crud, because it all goes into the slurry and doesn't get filtered out like in a dry blaster. So you only want to blast fairly clean stuff.
If you ever blast anything ferrous, it will rust before you can get the doors open on the cabinet to take it out, and even if you wd-40 or dip the parts instantly, it seems that the water permeates the metal and you can't get away from surface rust.
You have to maintain the machine more than a dry blaster, if you don't kick on the pump every once in a while, the slurry turns to a solid then you have to get in there with a crowbar or something to break it up. And the tank has a tendency to rot out, you have to keep some trim-sol or something in there for anti-rust measures.
But the finish is beautiful.
One kinda fun thing for me ... the Kerner Company was right down the street, I used to do little stuff for them occasionally, mostly small gears for their cameras. One day they brought in these things that were obviously robot arms to blast. They wouldn't say what they were, but mama din't raise no total fool.
Several months later went to
The Empire Strikes Back with this girl with the high-output performance package. Halfway through I'm like "wait ! wait ! I know those ! they're only eighteen inches tall !" Everybody was "shut up, you ass !" but it was like meeting an old friend.
Legs for the empire walkers .... but they model-railroad weathered them after the blasting, raw hydro-honed looks much nicer than that.
Did I mention the finish is beautiful ?
)