Eastwood Project of the Day- Soda Blasting a Valve Cover for Chrome and Powder

Many of us at Eastwood have numerous projects going on at a time. This is great for a few reasons, one of them is the chance to constantly be testing and using our products. This allows us to make our products better and also gives us experience in the use of our products so we can pass that knowledge on to our customers. We decided to share our small projects we tackle from time to time here on the blog in our Eastwood “Project of the Day” series.

When you send a part to be professionally painted, powder coated, polished or chromed the majority of the cost is in the prep work required to coat or polish the part. I currently have a project going where a lot of parts need to be chromed. Having items chromed is quite expensive, so I’m doing my best to save some cash by preparing the parts before I send them off. To achieve the ultra-reflective finish associated with chrome; the part must be mirror polished first. Therefore, the smoother and cleaner the part is, the easier it is for the chrome shop to prepare the part for the series of shiny baths. This valve cover is cast aluminum and has had a layer of black paint applied at some point that I needed to remove. Since the surface needs to be mirror polished before chrome, I needed to take care when removing any existing coatings. I chose to use our Small Job Blast Kit with soda because the soda media is delicate enough to remove the old black paint and not damage the surface. This will leave the valve cover as smooth as it was from new and speed things up for the chrome shop and save me some money!

The nice thing about this job is that setup and clean up is a breeze. The only things I used were an airline, the small job blast kit gun, and the bottle of soda abrasive media. I then cleaned the dust up with a shop vac, and cleaned the valve cover with a soapy water solution, and I was done. If only all of my projects were this quick and easy!

-Matt/EW