needle scaler

Sandblasting inevitably gets grit in everything. If you cannot take every single piece and wash it by hand in soapy water, then dry it carefully with rags and continue until a white paper towel shows no discoloration, you will have grit in your work.

The needle scaler is actually as fast or faster an a typical home-shop sandblaster, uses less air and doesn't leave 1000lbs of sand in the yard. The scaler may fling paint flakes all over the place, but I'd rather sweep up paint chips than deal with sand. You can work indoors also.

One thing I learned is NOT to run the scaler at extremely high air pressures. High pressure doesn't make the thing work any better than 50psi. It just beats you to death, makes more noise, and works the compressor harder.

You will also need a set of good earplugs. It's like a miniature jackhammer.

I'm with Dave 100% on this one. They're great for removing slag when you're stick welding, if you can stand the racket. Here is a way I used a needle scaler recently that gives a different example of their capability. I used wire feed (MIG) to create surface textures I liked on several pieces of metal sculpture, but weld spatter left lots of little wart-like dots. A 4'knotted wire cup wheel on a 9" Milwaukee angle grinder could only make the spatter shinier (or break my arm if my attention wandered) and knocking the dots down one at a time would have taken days. A needle scaler beat the dots of spatter down until they were the same as gone, removed all traces of arc burn, and softened the appearance of the metal surface in a way that opened a whole range of possibilities for future sculpture. The down side was that it took me more than 2 hours to scale about 170 square inches, not counting the half hour it took me to drag a table and the equipment outside after I was asked to leave the building. (Noisy)

All the best, Stan

Thanks. Yes I have tried it and I like the way it works. In the case I'm talking about, however, the design I was producing consisted of adjoining spirals of weld metal. The spatter would land on previous passes. Stopping to apply anti-spatter spray was not a practical option---it would have turned a painfully slow process into an agonizingly slow one. I think of myself as patient, but I suspect that other people in the shop already feel that "nuts" is a more accurate description.

Stan

Stan