How to Sandblast a Car Wheel

We pulled one of the wheels off the El Camino that we're working on, and we're gonna sandblast that scale rust out, and mask it up, reprime it and repaint it. But first I want to talk just a little bit about sandblasters. There's several different kinds of sandblasters. You know, there's little mini blasters, if you just got a real small area, there's gravity feed sandblasters, that have a hopper on top of the gun, and as you pull the trigger it feeds sand in. Very common types you find most parts stores is a siphon feed, where you just hook the air up to the sandblasting gun, and as the air pressure goes by it, it draws sand up, and that's probably the most common type.

Probably the best type though is a pressure type blaster. It's by far the most aggressive, so that's what we're gonna use today, different types of media too. We're gonna use just regular sand, but you could blast with soda, you can blast with walnut husk, you can blast with corn cob, steel shot, I mean, it's endless. The amount of sandblasting media, depending on the application that you're trying to accomplish, and what you're trying to accomplish. But we're going to just use regular sand.

One thing about sandblasting, the sand is very, very carcinogenic. You definitely wanna wear protective gear, respirator, I'm gonna put a hood on when I actually start blasting and get some gloves on. So, but I'm gonna suit up, go ahead and blast the rust out of this thing and take it from there. I got this one pretty well done. I got a little bit more to touch up, but a couple of things we'll talk about in blastin', you need a really good air compressor.

I mean, you need to have a lot of capacity to run any type of sandblaster. And then two, you need some kind of a line dryer. Any amount of water is going to, it gets the sand wet, clumps up, and then it plugs the nozzle up and you just do nothing but fight with it the whole time. So I got a little bit left to finish up but another thing too, if you're in the middle of a city, you probably don't wanna be blasting in your driveway and spraying it off into your neighbor's yard. So you may wanna look, there's a lot of places to do it commercially, you can actually get blast cabinets that are fairly substantial in size.

You could probably fit a rim in some of the bigger ones, not maybe with the tire on it, so there's blast cabinets, so you can reuse the media, and then talking about the media, we used just a silica sand today. It's a special sandblasting sand. You can get it at Home Depot, Fleet Farm, I mean any of the big, the big stores or even a parts store. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish blasting this one up, and it'll be ready to prime and paint.