Start of blast cabinet mark up

My needs for the cabinet are:

It must take an alloy wheel of suitable size, i have a full set of wire wheels and hub adapters, and i want to stripped thes done and re-finish them.

It must be square of dimension, in order to accept the wheels effectively, the depth has to be adequate to allow working the piece, there is a pot to yield inside, but i believe that i can leave the pot attached outside when its tight for space when blasting lasrge parts, and run a suitable hose from the gun, with its nozzle re-attached to the other end. We will see later if that works.

The ducting is marked Duct Mate, and is over 4ft tall as a single piece, so after study, i found that the natural height to work at would be standing, so i drew 2 circles on the front of the ducting to suit my elbow height, this will be the glove wholes for working.

I then planned the viewing aperture, and had sourced a piece of scrap double glazing ages ago, so stripped that down, and split it to remove a single piece of 6mm glass. I cut this to 24" x 12", im a better metal worker than a glass cutter, but i managed it.

I then drew my glass size on the ducting, and allowed a sealed surface around this. I plan to just apply a small neoprene or draught excluder to the glass to seal against the ducting, at the low levels of pressure, the sand should be kept well within the confines of the cabinet.

I would not recommend bonding it as it will get a hard life, and eventually cloud over through bounce back, or even break through damage, most of these units have replace glass. It is also notice from other builders that using acryilc can cloud over quickly and delight the user in electrostatic shocks during use, happy days!

a happy middle road is glass, with a consumable shield inside the unit, like 2-3 mm of acrylic sheet taped in front of it (i hate taped mods, but maybe this is less hassle)

At this point i had the overall dimensions of the cabinet marked, was happy with the height i had been working at, but i do not require a 4ft high unit of course, so i line was drawn to form the "base" of the unit.

The key to a succesful blast cabinet is a base that a allows firm support of your parts, an allow or wire wheel, cast iron manifold, all way may bags of sugar, so i will be sourcing a suitable wire base. I believe in recycling so i will try to source this from an abandoned shop trolley or similar.

Most blast cabinets have a base unit formed to a point to collect the blasted media in a hopper form, attached to a bag or similar. This allows you to recycle the media, and you can filter out large contaminates. You can re-use most, but sand is one of the worst is it smashes and makes ever finer dust (read Silicosis) as your repeat its use. Obviously the small the sand grains, the less effective they can become.

The width of the unit is 700 mm, so i marked a cut line of 725 mm, the extra 25mm is to form a flange to allow bolting of the hopper/base. Both end of the original ducting sheet havea substantial flange on the, i will utilise this in the hopper design for speed of build, and is very well sealed.

On to hopper design next...