"vacuum sand blaster"
What's that? OK, I found it on Snap-on site, so still what's that?
I looked and it looks like a mess to me, no real details on it so I can only guess.
My guess is it's simply a cup type design that rubs along your part with hopefully a decent seal to contain the media, you blast with a sand blaster and a giant shop Vac sucks up the media and dust. For this they want $1,400
NOT ME!
OK, I had (still have somewhere) a spot blaster. It had several types of rubber cups to use on parts, a small fine cloth type bag under it to fill with a little media, suction feed design. Pull trigger and airflow sucks media out of bag to blast part, suction in bag helps pull media back into bag for reclaim and excess air escapes through bag, cup stops media from being blowed out and lost. Cost was around $100 maybe a bit more at the time I bought it. Kinda worked good if you had a decent seal. I have not used it for many years so don't remember allot other than it worked good for spot blasting on car bodies if you got a decent seal.
How many shapes, angles, corners, holes, etc... will you be working with not having a decent seal?
So there ya go, buy a good decent cheap tool and get the rubber cups, connect a shop VAC to suck more air than you blow, blast with a decent gun. Build it yourself for maybe $300 in parts if that.
You'll have a system that not only BLOWS but it SUCKS too, just like SNAP-ON.
If your a little creative and have some decent tools I bet you could build something as good far cheaper, and WHEN not IF but WHEN it breaks down you can fix it without the high cost of Snap-On to deal with! Couple of Shop vacs at $38 each and some filters 3/$4 anytime needed. How much is just a Snap-On filter for that system?
REALLY, take a good look at the larger image link on this page!
http://buy1.snapon.com/catalog/item....re&dir=catalog
The working end of this unit looks to be a rubber cup, shop vac hose connection, and a cheap blast gun. Maybe a better blaster than a siphon feed though it looks like a simple cheapo siphon feed blaster to me in the picture, no details to say any different!
Put a bag where that shop vac hose is and siphon from the bag and it looks like that tool I have here. (on the work end)
For $38 I just bought a new shop vac yesterday. If I take the bag off the spot blaster and connect the shop vac hose, put on a line to siphon feed media instead of sucking it from the bag, then I have a vacum blaster similar to the $1400 one, so it looks like and it costs less than $200.
Use 2 shop vacs, put a line on each with a valve to close them. Suck into one vac when working and draw media from the second. Easy swap of the lines to switch from one vac to the other. So suck media from one to blast with and suck back to the other to reclaim, when one tanks full and other empty swap vacs!