Sand Blaster with 10 Foot Hose, Sand Blast Gun, and Wrench - Siphon Feed (Campbell Hausfeld AT122601AV) , Black

This gun is suprisingly well made and just plain works. The low cost made me anticipate a lower quality tool that I thought I'd use once or twice and then discard, scrap or replace. But it's working and lasting just great. I've blown sifted beach sand, HDepot play sand, HFreight coal slag and Baking Soda through it. It's never choked or plugged.To feed media into the thing I first just set the pickup tube into the bag of sand. I found that wanted to draw the tube down to the bottom of the bag. As some others have noted, if the TOP of the pickup tube becomes "submerged" in the blast media, it won't suck up the stuff appropriately. My simple fix was to set the thing in a 5 gal bucket, bottom of the tube in the "corner" of the bucket. Then fill with a few inches of blast media. That way the bottom of the tube is always "above ground" and it can't get sucked hard against the plastic bottom (since it's at an angle).A bag of sand or any media will last an unbelievably long time. The gun uses suprizingly little media to do the job. I added a cheap valve and gauge from Freight By The Bay right at the base of the gun to control the air pressure. Total cost of that addition was under ten bucks. Bag of coal slag media from the same place was nine bucks before coupon.I've only used relatively fine media. Blasting steel bumpers and car panels cleans every bit of paint, rust etc very quickly with no damage to the steel. Leaves it with a very even matte finish. A little too smooth for direct prime and paint, I'd still rough it up with whatever grade abrasive paper you'd normally use prior to painting. But this thing sure does eliminate a lot of that silly wire wheel nonsense to get the old paint off. Plus it gets in all the corners and tight spots you can't do with a wire brush.I'm blastin' stuff I never thought of. Car parts, stucco, garden rocks, wood.I think you could even use it wet, to blow detergent or solvent. Just submerge the entire pickup tube in the liquid. I haven't tried that but the documentation suggests you can.

This little bad boy kicks some butt with the right blast media. I found my favorite (and least expensive) media to be Black Diamond blasting abrasives. The media is $8 for a 50lb bag at the big chain tractor supply place I won't mention here ;). These two items combined have tackled everything I've thrown at it. The gun NEVER jams up, at least not yet for me, with the aforementioned media. Definitely wear a face shield when using this. If you're blasting parts in the driveway or yard the media ricochets every which way, including into your face which will be ever so close to observe the procedure and progress. You'll definitely be wanting to get a shower or jump in the pool (creek, lake, whatever) after blasting a few pieces. It runs really well on my HF 2.5hp 21 gal compressor. The trick is to pulse the trigger as other reviewers have mentioned if you have a small to medium sized compressor.My latest project is restoration of a 25 year old motorcycle and this sand blaster was indispensable for cleaning old parts to bare metal and prepping for paint. With the media I mentioned above it takes 25 year old lacquer paints right off and leaves a nice satin surface perfect for painting.I have nothing but praise for this product and the ease of use. It makes finish removal actually sorta, kinda, almost . . . fun. And it's so much faster than stinky removal gels/liquids or sand paper.If you are in need of a quick and simple way to remove old finish from metal parts, grab one of these an make your life a little easier.

WOW, this thing is an air-hog. The box says 9 CFM @ 90 PSI and I believe it. This tool will bring any 120V compressor to its knees if you try to run it flat-out.I was using it to blast the underside of my Jeep with Quickrete play sand. The sand fed great at 90 PSI, started to sputter around 80 PSI, and basically stopped working at 60 PSI. I have a 2.5 HP Ingersoll Rand compressor that claims to do 6.4 CFM @ 90 PSI. Boy was that a lie. I was getting literally 20-30 seconds of decent blasting (basically the time it took to bleed the 20 gal tank from 110 PSI down to 80 PSI), then I'd have to stop and wait several minutes for the compressor to catch up. I even added my 7 gal portable tank into the mix at one point to buy myself a few more seconds with the extra volume.Richard J. Kinch has a great page called "Evaluating True Horsepower and CFM Ratings of Air Compressors". After reading that, I did the experiments with my compressor and found that it was actually only putting out 1.4 CFM @ 90 PSI. Talk about frustrating! DON'T TRUST MANUFACTURER COMPRESSOR SPECS!! Needless to say, a new compressor is now on my wishlist. And I'm not going to buy it unless they let me fire it up and stopwatch its cycle-time first.Kinch was also a bit of a depressing read. He explains that there simply is not enough energy coming out of a 15A 120V outlet to generate more than about 6 CFM at 90 PSI, and that's with a two-stage compressor in a perfect world. After you account for the various inefficiencies and losses, the best-case is really about 3-4 CFM at 90 PSI. Given the knowledge that it's physically impossible for a 120V compressor to keep up with 9 CFM @ 90 PSI, the best setup for this tool would be a high PSI compressor with an adjustable "cut-in" point, a large tank, and of course the highest CFM you can get. If the compressor will do 150 PSI and you can set the cut-in point to, say 125 PSI, you may be able stay out in front of the 90 PSI mark. Assuming you're taking natural pauses here and there while blasting, AND that your compressor and power source can handle 100% duty cycle.This blaster may also preform better at a lower PSI with finer media. The play sand was nice and clean, but a little coarser than I expected. Still, it barely made a dent in the rust and road-grime. I suspect that anything finer would have just bounced off of my project.Also, forgot to mention that the first thing I did after opening the package was cut the siphon hose down from 10' to 5'. Not sure if that helped or hurt since I didn't test it before hand. Intuitively, it seems like it would help. Also tried converting the siphon from a pick-up tube to a gravity feed set up at one point by attaching the hose to the bottom of an open bucket. I couldn't get it to feed at all. Still seems like a sound idea, just didn't have time to sort out the details that day.Also, also, this tool will REALLY expose any water contamination problems in your compressed air system. The crappy little water/oil separator I had wasn't doing a thing.Giving up on the blaster for now and trying a needle scaler instead to knock the big stuff off.FOLLOW-UP: The needle scaler was DEFINITELY the way to go for my project. Spent about 2 days going at it with a scraper and a knotted wire cup, got about 15% done. Spent a full day going at it with this blaster, got another 10% done. Spent 6 hours with the needle scaler and got the remaining 75% knocked out. Live and learn.