The Best Glass Bead Blasting Tips On How To Have Longlasting Bead Life and Best Finish

Here are some tips on how to improve the bead blasting technique for your business. About 90% of the bead blasting projects was where the finish was mostly a dull finish with maybe a little bit of a satin shine to it, but generally fairly poor. Glass beads have been really popular for many years, it’s really popular among restoration people. Unfortunately, a lot of people see them as a silver bullet for restoring parts. They expect these beads to clean everything off of parts: rust, scale, dirt, and grease. And then use these same beads to leave a great finish, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in the first place if you think about it. It’s a compromise like everything else, so without being said, here are some tips that we can give you on how to get the best finish you can with glass beads.

Use Low Pressure For Bead Blasting & 50 PSI(3.5 Bar) Is A Good Starting Point
First of all, turn down your pressure. Glass beads are meant to be used at low pressure. So turn the pressure down as low as possible, this is the most important factor you can use for increasing the life of your beads and getting a higher finish. Remember this is glass, so what happens when you throw a glass against a hard object, it smashes. It’s the same way with glass beads. Use 50 PSI with siphon blaster, that’s a good starting pressure. You can go higher, but the higher you go the shorter the life of the beads. Glass beads are meant to be a finishing medium since they’re round and smooth and you can tell that they’re not designed to cut. They’re made to burnish or polish apart. just like any other tumbling media would, but does it at a higher rate. Keep in mind that the pressure that you use to create a high finish on parts won’t clean a surface. It won’t even remove the water stain. If you turn the pressure up with glass beads to force them to clean and they will, but if you do that to force them to clean, what’s going to happen is the beads will begin to smash upon impact with your part, essentially turning the beads into the crushed glass. At that point, you’re not even using beads. Crush beads is a very effective blasting media, but there’s no sense in buying expensive high-quality glass beads just to smash them to dust when you to be able to clean parts. if you’re going to do that, just buy the crushed glass instead and use that. It’s a lot cheaper in beads. It’s about half the price of glass beads. So you might as well just buy that.

Also, when you smash beads into your parts, you start producing a lot of excess dust and sharp particles that get trapped in the cabinet, they would fall onto the rest of your clean remaining beads. It will contaminate them. This in turn gets picked up with your good beads and degrades the finish. It almost goes without saying that when higher pressures are used smashes of beads on impact, embeds a lot of those particles into the surface. So if the part you’re blasting is an internal engine part or some critical part that’s not supposed to have glass embedded in it, that’s a really bad idea to use high pressures.

Strip off Any Oxides Or Rust First With a Cutting Type Abrasive
You can’t put a great finish on aluminum without first stripping off the oxide layer. The layer is too hard to burnish properly and the stains will not be removed. Even though it might get some shine, it’s going to look like shine stains. You will not be able to strip off this oxide layer with glass beads, because they’re not designed to cut like we previously mentioned. Instead use a dedicated sharp cutting abrasive to clean off this oxide or rust, abrasive such as crushed glass, black beauty aluminum oxide, etc. Our preferred abrasive by far is crushed glass because it cleans as fast as aluminum oxide or silicon carbide, it’s extremely clean. It leaves a nice bright whiter finish on metals. It’s a fraction of the cost and in fact, it’s about half the cost of silicon carbide. Regardless of the abrasive you use, anything with the flower light consistency works great. If you’re dealing with scale, mix in some coarser braces with that to take off the heavier scale.

So if you’ve been having problems trying to get a good finish with bead blasting, follow these guidelines and your finish will improve greatly, hopefully, you found this informative, and click HERE to see more!