[Heathkit] Bead Blasting

[Glen Zook]

Bead blasting will remove paint.  However, unless you are using a real blasting cabinet (with a good bead recovery system) you will find that the process is pretty costly (the beads are not "cheap").  When I owned the Motorola reconditioned equipment center for the south-central United States (1970 until Motorola went out of that "end" of the business in 1979) we used bead blasting to clean the radios and, in certain situations, to remove paint.  However, there was a 7.5 HP compressor that ran from 3-phase AC to provide enough air flow for the system to work well.

I normally use a small "orbital" hand sander (they cost $15 or less) to remove the paint from most cabinets.  The process doesn't take that long because Heath did not prime the cabinets before painting.  As such, the paint comes off pretty fast.

Glen, K9STH

Website:  http://k9sth.com


--- On Fri, 11/20/09, Walt - WB2VSJ <wb2vsj at earthlink.net> wrote:

Has anyone tried bead blasting a Heath SB series cabinet to remove the old paint?  I have a SB-101, SB-610 and a SB-600 cabinet that have seen better days paint-wise.  Rather than sand these by hand I was thinking of getting a small bead blaster gun from Harbor Freight and trying that.