With the blasting drape making life considerably easier, I have been progressing with the clean-up under the scuttle and on the bonnet. I confess that the surface rust which had established so voraciously under the bonnet area and along the top of the scuttle was as a result of my own negligence. These are areas that I had previously taken back to bare metal and then not treated with any paint to prevent flash rusting. I don't know why, I just seem to make mindless mistakes occasionally (will I ever learn?!):
I was making steady progress until I dropped my trusty old shot blaster and it snapped at a brittle weak point where the grit hopper attaches to the bottom of the gun. Damn it! Unfortunately It cracked off part of the casting that had an internal thread, which rendered it beyond repair:
I picked up a replacement gun that operates slightly differently:
It utilises a pick-up tube and syphon hose that can pull the blast media from a bucket. The main advantage being that I don't need to constantly stop to refill a hopper anymore. Assuming a big enough bucket of media is used, then the limiting factor is really just the duty cycle of the compressor:
As soon as I started using it I kinda wished that my old spot blaster had broken sooner as by comparison it was starkly apparent that it had become rather inefficient over time. In summary, I am happy with what has turned out to be an unplanned upgrade. The gun is far superior and faster to blast with:
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