Sandblast-it!

We had a delivery from E-Bay this week, our long awaited Sandblaster. It is a small pistol with a plastic tank that you put the sand in. You then have to put it in the end of an air-compressor, to push the sand out. That's where the fun started.

Not knowing a lot about compressors, we had a look on-line and asked around to try and see what we needed. The box with the compressor said it needed 90-115 PSI (pounds per square inch) and 3 horsepower, but the French people we spoke to spoke a lot about the number of litres of air that it put through each hour and that it must have a 100 litre tank.

We made up our mind that a 200 Euro 3CV compressor in Castorama would be OK for us, although it only had a 50 litre tank. However , when we got there they had an offer on a 2CV compressor (that could produce the right pressure) that was on offer for 84 Euros, so we to a chance, and bought the bargain. We also picked up some safety gear, a face mask and a respirator, along with a connecting hose, we picked up a sack of sand and we thought that we were ready to go.

When we got home, I put the compressor together, but couldn't work out where to connect the hose. I went to the local builders merchants with the instructions to get some help. I managed to get an adaptor for the end of the hose, but not before getting the piss ripped out of me by the lad in the shop, for buying a crappy castorama compressor in the first place.

Armed with the new adaptor, I put on my safety gear and started work. It started of OK, and cleaned up some of the stones, but soon seemed to struggle. As it was getting dark, we decided to stop, and try again in daylight.

The next morning, I had another go and it soon became clear that the bloke in the builders merchant was right, the compressor wasn't up to the job. I rang up castorama to see if I we could swap the compressor for a bigger one, even though I had tested it. They said yes, so I took it apart, cleaned it up, put it back in it's box, and headed off back to Limoges.

This time, I took the advice of the the bloke in the shop who pointed out that the only compressor that was up to it was 500 Euros, way out of our price range. Armed with a refund, I was now off to the local hire shop, to try one out for the day.

At the hire shop, the owner showed me how to operate the compressor and helped me load it into the car. When I was writing out the deposit cheque, I asked the owner the date. 'Vendredi 13eme, le meme en Angleterre ? ' . I told him that it was the same in England. I also thought that maybe it was not the best day to use some industrial kit for the first time.

So, I got the compressor home, connected it all up, and turned it on. After two seconds it stopped. I checked the fuses, and found that it had blown a 10 amp one. Next I connected it up to a socket on a 16 Amp fuse, but it wouldn't go. I checked the socket and extension lead out. Everything was OK bar the compressor so , in desperation I phoned the shop. The owner said that he would come out and have a look, and luckily, I didn't get him lost with my French directions.

He played around with it for five minutes, but it did nothing. He had a look at the blurb which he had brought with him, but it held no clues. All the time, I'm thinking 'Friday 13th'. Finally, he fiddled around with the machine, and found a tiny black button, on a black background, which turned out to be the reset button. Success!

Sand came out for a while, but then stopped. We had some more fun and games, while he drained the water that had built up in the bottom of the tank, but when he left, it all seemed to work OK. He had a look at the area that I wanted to clean that day, wished me 'bon courage' and left me to it.

The sand flow was a bit intermittent, but it did work most of the time, once I had blown any remaining air out of the compressor tank, but it the effect wasn't quite as good as we had hoped.

We had hoped it would be like a pressure washer, cleaning the moss of of a patio, but it proved a lot harder to clean the stones, as you had to hold the pistol a few inches away from the stones. It didn't come up like Salisbury Cathedral, but it did clean out all of the joints around the stones, so we are almost ready to start re-pointing.

As for next time, a proper sized sandblaster costs £1,500 and then needs a compressor the size of the ones that BT uses to did up roads, so we will see.