retrofitting an agitator

[krymis]

i have a Clarke SB9006 blast cabinet and would like to retrofit an agitator to it. Any ideas? I have no idea how they work or what they are. Also i have excessive media coming out of the lid area. I checked the seals and they are good and I checked the latches for the lid and they are tight. I am not running any vac to it and i have the foam filter in the back inlet and a cone filter on the vac hook up/oulet.

[Hobweld]

I have basically the same setup just different company. Add the vac attachment that will help ALOT on the leakage around the glass. Keeps the dust down too. I also added a couple of floods to it.
If you are having problems with sand flow. Here are a couple of tips for you.
1. Are you using the pickup tube properly?
The pickup tube is a double walled tube for a reason. It allows air to flow into the sand as the siphon action is applied. If you have the hose tight against the outer wall it won't do this.

2. Overfill your media.
Yeah I know they say only 25 lbs. but I fill mine almost up to the screen inside.

3. You can add a tube across the whole bottom with about 3 holes in it. Make sure the opposite end is above the media level.

4. All a agitator is comprised of is basically a motor with a off-center weight on the shaft to make it out of balance. A small motor could easilly be mounted to the cabinet to shake the sand down for you. Good Luck.

Ken

[krymis]

ken,

Can you go into more depth on the agitator and the pick up tube modifications?

[ShelbyCSXT]

The "fresh air" tube next to the media pickup is there to allow air to lift up media on it's way to your blasting gun. If you dont have the tube, it makes it harder for the gun to pull media through (because air isn't washing over your media and lifting it up).

All the agitator does is shakes your media off the sides of the cabinet so that it can get used. But if you have plenty of media in your cabinet, then you won't have to worry about agitating it back down.