The Armour Archive

The shop I'm living in has a sand blaster (enclosed chamber where you reach through the holes into rubber gloves) and was wondering about doing decorative brasswork for armor trim and such. Anyone ever done it before?

You can mask off your metal with duct tape then cut with a razor blade (exacto knife) the design.

Then toss it in the blast bead cabinet and go at it.
Try not to blast your tape off.
Hit it straight on with the blast spray.

Peal off the tape and Voila an etched pattern.

Happy blasting

Hal

Depending on the blasting media probibly a finer sand would work best. the local TSC only stocks very corse grit that would shread ducktape.
my brother when taking an artclass eched a pain of glass in a simalar method using masking tape.
A lazysusan style turntable may help if you decide to ech any beer mugs for holiday gifts.

You can vary several things in a media blasting booth. One is the grit of the media. Bot you can also vary nozzel tip and air pressure. For working with soft materials it is often useful to turn down the air pressure. Even working with very hard materials like glass there are media, nozzel and pressure ranges that will allow you to frost the glass without destroying the tape... it may take some experimentation to get the desired effect.

or you could acid etch it and achieve a similar effect. We can document this being used in period while we can't document using sand blasting.

Sean