“Can you automate it?” was the second question at the Kresco booth all week, right behind “how big a room do we need?” The honest answer is that robotic blasting is the best tool for a specific kind of job and overkill for most others. This post is about telling the two apart, because the shops that get the most out of a robot are the ones that bought it for the right reason. Kresco builds robotic sandblast systems as stand-alone cells and as additions to a blast room, and we quote both.
Watch: a Kresco robotic blast cell running
What a blasting robot actually buys you
A six-axis robot holding the nozzle gives you three things a person can’t: a constant standoff distance, a constant angle of attack, and a constant traverse speed over every square inch of the part. That is the whole value. It is not primarily about speed; a good manual blaster is fast. It’s about every part coming out the same, shift after shift, with a profile or a peening intensity you can put a number on. If nobody is measuring your finish, a robot is solving a problem you don’t have.
Four signs a robot is the right call
- The finish is specified. Aerospace, medical, and coating specs that call out a profile range, an Almen intensity, or a coverage percentage. A robot hits the number; a person hits it most of the time.
- The part is complex and repeats. Castings, impellers, housings, and weldments with pockets, masked areas, and blind spots, where an operator has to think about every pass. Program it once, run it forever.
- You can’t put a person in the dust. Facilities with respiratory-exposure limits, beryllium or lead-containing coatings, or a workforce you can’t keep in supplied-air gear for a shift.
- Volume with a labor constraint. You have the parts but not the blasters. A robotic cell runs with one operator loading and unloading and otherwise blasts unattended.
When something simpler is better
Most automation requests are really part-handling requests in disguise. If the operator’s time is going into rigging, turning and walking around the part, a rotary table or turntable inside the cabinet or room fixes that for a fraction of a robot’s cost. If the parts are round, a cylinder and pipe blaster with fixed nozzles does the job with no programming at all. If they’re small and plentiful, a tumble basket processes a whole batch while someone else does the loading. These fixed-nozzle machines are what we recommend for the majority of “automate my blasting” conversations; they take the person out of the blast stream without putting a robot programmer on the payroll.
Robot in a cabinet vs. robot in a room
For parts up to a few hundred pounds, Kresco builds the robot into an enclosed cell with its own media reclaim and dust collection, the same recovery and filtration as a production cabinet. For large parts, the robot goes into a blast room, usually on a track or gantry so it can reach the length of a frame or a vessel, with the room’s mechanical recovery floor feeding media back to the pot and the room’s dust collector handling the air. In both cases the robot runs from the same PLC and HMI as the rest of the system, with recipes stored per part number.
What to bring to the conversation
A robot quote is driven by part geometry, so we need drawings or sample parts, the spec you’re blasting to, annual volume, and whether you already have a room. If you don’t, we’ll design the cell and the room together; adding a robot to a room that wasn’t designed for one means re-doing the recovery floor and the lighting. The Abrasive Blast Rooms Buyer’s Guide covers the room side; for the robot side, send us the part and we’ll tell you whether it wants a robot, a turntable, or a tumble basket.
After the robot: protect the finish
A robotically blasted part is a precisely prepared surface, and it starts flash-rusting the moment it leaves the cell. If coating or assembly isn’t immediate, a Cortec VpCI rust preventative or VCI packaging holds the profile the robot just paid for.
Part of our automated blasting series. See also: Automated Abrasive Blasting Systems: Turntables, Conveyors, Tumble & Robotic Sandblasting and the full automated abrasive blasting systems line.
