Blast day!!
45 minutes and 150 pounds of sand gets me this.
Half of that 45 minutes was spent getting it to draw sand properly. I started out drawing out of the bag, but that didn't work very well. I ended up with this. With awesome daughter manning the bucket, it would feed sand like a champ.
Awesome wife is going to get me another 500 pounds of glass.
Initial impression are it works great. You will still have sand in places you didn't know existed, but you won't be breathing all that dust or sweating you butt off in a dust mask and hood. I like it.
Awesome wife just got back...More to come.
You're not reusing the blasting media?
In reply to Petrolburner:
I'm going to be shoveling it up and trying to dry it out again. We'll see how that works. For now, I'm running new media.
So, there is some good and bad. We are 300 pounds of media into this and and things are going pretty well.
The blaster does a great job on paint and a fair job on rust. For dollars spent, it works great.
Unfortunately, the tip on the blaster is done. I probably should have been rotating it every 5-10 minutes and didn't. It's cut out of one side pretty bad and doesn't want to draw media anymore. Worse, Northern doesn't stock spares. 
Wife of awesome is headed down to Northern now to beg them to steal a tip out of a box and order more or buy another blaster kit. We'll see how that works out.
I'll leave you with a short video of how it's working for me. It's not super fast, but it's getting the job done. You can see in the video it's already having a hard time drawing media and the spray is coming out at an angle.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/YATjO6yYtnI
In reply to Toyman01:
Did you guys ever get my final "Poster" from your adventure? I believe it was your wife emailed me about it and I emailed back the final rendition.
SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote:
In reply to Toyman01:
Did you guys ever get my final "Poster" from your adventure? I believe it was your wife emailed me about it and I emailed back the final rendition.
I think she did. It will end up on a T-shirt before it's all said and done if that's OK with you.
The passenger side is blasted. Tomorrow it will be getting treated with Ospho in the morning and hopefully be coated with primer by the afternoon.
NOHOME
PowerDork
4/2/16 5:33 p.m.
Seems to work well...but that is a lot of bus!
A couple of thoughts on the water sandblasting.
Over all, I prefer it to regular sandblasting, but it does have one glaring disadvantage. Dry media can be sifted and run through the gun again. Wet media can't. I'm going to try to dry what I've used so far and use it again. We'll see how that works.
It sure was nice to not have to wear a respirator or hood today. That alone makes water blasting worthwhile to me.
I bought the General Pump blaster from Norther Tool. It was pretty cheap and works pretty well, but durable it isn't. I burned up two tips today. Not that big a deal except they are $30 each. Rotating them regularly didn't help. If anything, it made the tip unusable even faster. I should have spent more money and bought a blast kit with a ceramic tip. I may be doing that anyways. If I burn through 4-5 more tips finishing the bus, it may be cheaper to buy a better gun. Stay tuned for more on that.
Toyman01 wrote:
SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote:
In reply to Toyman01:
Did you guys ever get my final "Poster" from your adventure? I believe it was your wife emailed me about it and I emailed back the final rendition.
I think she did. It will end up on a T-shirt before it's all said and done if that's OK with you.
Fine by me. I'm just glad someone will enjoy it. 
This is it, if some of you didn't see it:
Ospho is some wonderful stuff.
This:
To this:
In about 15 minutes. Iron oxide to iron phosphate. 
Now we wait for that to dry. I am hoping to prime it this afternoon.
XLR99
HalfDork
4/3/16 8:43 a.m.
Stupid question - how are you putting the ospho on? Spray bottles, roller, brush?
In reply to XLR99:
It cleans up with water so I ran it through my spray gun.
I have brushed it on, sprayed it with a spray bottle, and even run it through a garden sprayer with success. It's pretty easy stuff to use.
After an hour, it looks like this.
Now if I could just find a back yard paint system that would dry instantly. I hate waiting for paint to dry.
Real automotive paint dries pretty fast, although you'll want to wear the right protective gear.
Keith Tanner wrote:
Real automotive paint dries pretty fast, although you'll want to wear the right protective gear.
Yeah, but then the paint job would cost as much as the bus. 
Now all I need is a couple of rocks and some bamboo. 
This has been a good, productive, weekend. Half of SanFord has been blasted, treated with Ospho, and primed.
I was able to dry and recover most of the media.
We ran it through 3 consecutively smaller screens, to get all the trash and paint chips out. It shouldn't have any problem going back through the gun. That should give me enough to do the other side, without having to buy more.
It is, ever so slowly, coming together.
More to come.
Any decisions on paint schemes and/or colors?
In reply to DatsunS130:
No.
I keep flopping between something garish like the Gulf scheme or green, and something understated like white, gray, dark gray. It will probably depend on my mood when I walk in the store to buy paint. It may even come down to what they have in stock. I hate picking paint colors. That's probably why every car I've ever painted has ended up white.
If you're just using cheap alkyd oil paint from lowes or whatever it's not like you're out a lot of money if you change your mind later.
Toyman01 wrote:
Keith Tanner wrote:
Real automotive paint dries pretty fast, although you'll want to wear the right protective gear.
Yeah, but then the paint job would cost as much as the bus.
It's not that bad, but I've never purchased it in bus quantities The NAPA house brand single stage is actually really easy to lay down nicely, and I'm pretty sure it's cheap. Not house paint cheap, but it'll probably hold up better at the same time. Of course, it probably won't play nice with that primer.
