[chromo]

I'm just blasting normal aluminum oxide. Any time you blast in the open you should wear at least a filter mask or better. Even with a cabinet it's good to wear a mask in case of dust leaks.
I do, but I have a beard and Mustache and that makes it harder to get a good seal on your face with the masks, I was doing some open blasting for awhile before I started building the chest freezer cabinet.. Add to that the wife and kid have been having a little sinus trouble from normal stuff living in the woods and off a dirt road here, so what's bothering them could be adding to the problem for me too though nothing normally bothers me like that.

I think those vacuum blasters could be good for allot of things but not for others. I'm waiting a bit before blasting any more to see if I get more headaches or not. I'll be building a vacuum blaster with 2 tanks on a cart. A dead shop vac that has holes for inlet and outlet, it will hold the media. As the suction draws the media back into the tank it will fall to the bottom, there will be the normal foam and paper filters in the dead vac. Then I'll run the hose from the outlet to the new shop vac which of course will have it's filters. Also in the dead vac I may put a section of window screen as a filter to catch any large trash from falling into the media below.
As planned for now I will put the dead vac on top and the good vac on bottom on the cart, use a siphon/gravity feed from the bottom of the dead vac to the blaster gun. Also I was only using a 2HP vac for testing. Since it seemed to work fairly well with 2HP I may try a 5HP and see if I get more suction and if it works even better.

I have some old truck frames and large parts I want to blast if this works well. Nothing fancy, just clean off the rust and paint them. So when I build this and use it I'll post pics and details if it works decent like I think it will. Probably gonna be about 2 weeks though, busy with other stuff right now.