My Account
BLOWING THROUGH ABRASIVE AND FALLING BEHIND…
I am Jerry Gooden a Project Consultant at BlastOne. I was on a jobsite recently for a customer who was having issues burning through abrasive and behind on schedule.
They had been averaging 600-700sqft/day per blaster and about 5-6lbs/sqft of GX2 Garnet.
They were running (4) Hyper-7 blast nozzles off a 1600cfm compressor with 200-250’ of 1.5” blast hose plus a whip.
So this is what I did… and I’ll explain why in a moment…
With all 4 blasters going I was measuring 105psi at the nozzle, once I put a new Hyper-7 nozzle in the pressure went up to 130psi.
This simple change increased their daily production by a staggering 35-40% – after just changing the nozzles they were now achieving 800-900sqft/day per blaster and the garnet consumption came down to under 4lbs/sqft.
So why did I change out the nozzles? They looked good.
I decided to measure the #7 nozzles with an analyzer gage, and it showed they were worn out to just under a ½” (a #8 nozzle).
Here’s a quick tip if you don’t’ have an analyzer gage on site:
Nozzle sizes are measured in 16ths of an inch… a #4 has 4/16″ orifice – a #5 has a 5/16″ orifice – a #7 has a 7/16″ orifice and so on.
A nozzle is considered worn if the orifice has enlarged by a half a size… which is an additional 1/32 of an inch.
An easy way to check if your #7 nozzle is worn too much is to insert a 15/32” drill bit into the rear of the nozzle and if it passes through – it’s time to get a new nozzle.
And here’s the value of a new nozzle:
On this 100,000 sqft job by simply replacing the slightly worn blast nozzles, they increased their nozzle pressure from 105psi to 130psi, which saved them about 12 days of blasting and used 4 truckloads less of abrasive.
That is huge!
Some of you may be wondering, how is that possible a worn nozzle can have such a significant cost and schedule impact on my project – well next week we are going to explain so it all makes sense!
