Has anyone tried one of the Harbior Freight baking-soda blasters?

[jakeru]

I have a small homemade blasting cabinet I use for glass bead blasting, I built it out of a plastic storage box so it doesn't take up all that much room. It works OK on small parts but you need to have the patience. I've used it on small aluminum parts (like a turbocharger parts) and copper parts (antique copper teapot) with very nice looking results. Its kind of a hassle to get out and use though, so I rarely use it. Besides the cabinet just not being large enough, part of the problem is it takes a lot of air flow (and not necessarily pressure) to properly blast with glass beads. My compressor is just a 115V deal and is underpowered for very much blasting. A good air compressor for blasting would have very high cfm @ maybe only 40-50 psi or so, I hear from the blasting pros. Don't run too much pressure at least with glass beads, or you'll shatter them. With proper pressure, you can re-use the media many times.

I've never tried soda (calcium carbonate, right?) blasting before, but would imagine it would be more gentle than your average media. I'm imagining you are going to need a really big compressor to make it work well.

I'd like to see dry ice (CO2) blasting done sometime. The idea of doing your blasting out in the open and not worrying about cleaning up or recycling the media (since it just evaporates) sounds pretty cool.

Edit: here is the before/after photo of a turbocharger compressor housing I glass bead blasted. Note the "matt" texture; its a pretty nice appearance. This is using "AC" grade media.