metalman
Oldtimer
Anyone use or have experience with using dry ice blasting to strip paint?
The technology has been around for a long time, I believe it was developed to blast bridges to avoid much of the cleanup with conventional media. The "media" is CO2 and just evaporates.
In the early eighties there was a local painting outfit that had the equipment mounted on large flatbeds for mobile use. They had a part in developing the method and I saw samples of removing paint from various substrates including wood as in residential paint stripping. It worked. Like a lot of other things it starts out as expensive, complicated and not practical for smaller work but I suspect that should have changed by now.
It may still be not practical but looks like a better alternative to the mess with dry media or the wet blasting with the crushed glass. I don't see how it could leave any contamination behind. Don't know how effective it would be with pitted rust.
The technology has been around for a long time, I believe it was developed to blast bridges to avoid much of the cleanup with conventional media. The "media" is CO2 and just evaporates.
In the early eighties there was a local painting outfit that had the equipment mounted on large flatbeds for mobile use. They had a part in developing the method and I saw samples of removing paint from various substrates including wood as in residential paint stripping. It worked. Like a lot of other things it starts out as expensive, complicated and not practical for smaller work but I suspect that should have changed by now.
It may still be not practical but looks like a better alternative to the mess with dry media or the wet blasting with the crushed glass. I don't see how it could leave any contamination behind. Don't know how effective it would be with pitted rust.