[Captions by Y Translator] In today's video,
we're taking a look at how to make a DIY sandblaster
that you can use to etch glass, mark steel,
or engrave wood.
[Music]
Hi guys, I'm Nate.
I'm Calli.
And today, we've got a pretty cool project.
So sandblasters are thing that take high pressure air,
and drops sand into the air stream,
and so the sand gets blasted out at high speeds,
and the sand is really hard.
It's usually made of things like quartz,
and so those are very good at etching pretty much anything.
You can carve into steel,
you can carve in a glass, you can carve into wood.
Unfortunately,
sometimes sandblasters can be pretty pricey.
Today, we're showing you
how to cut that down to about five or six dollars,
and just a few tools.
And from what you've explained to me,
sand can be incredibly abrasive and sometimes scratch areas
that you don't want scratch.
So what are the other supplies that were using?
Well, in addition to the sandblaster itself,
we're going to show you how to do some DIY masking techniques.
Sometimes using materials as simple as duct tape.
I'm also going to warn you that this project does require
owning an air compressor.
So we've got a large air compressor with a big tank,
and that's what we're going to be using.
But everything other than the compressor
itself is very cheap and easy to get.
The idea is pretty simple.
A drink bottle will be filled with sand,
which will feed into a hole
that we're going to add into our air gun.
The sand will be pushed out by air at high speeds,
and carve into whatever we're pointing it at.
To start off,
the main thing that we're going to need is this airgun.
Now, I got this one at Harbor Freight.
It cost five dollars,
and it's already a pretty good start.
We just need to make one quick modification to it,
and then we'll be ready to start using it.
Do you guys know
what sound does semi-automatic meow-chine gun makes me?
Here, our airgun is actually attached to our hose,
and so we can spray air out of it nicely.
Now, we need to modify it
so it actually shoots sand instead of air,
and of course, once there's sand in it,
never ever pointed at a person.
Air is negotiable.
Calli's making quick work of the drink bottle.
We need this bottle empty,
and then we'll rinse it and dry it out.
Our bottle is now empty and dried out.
I'm just going to take an exacto knife,
and I'm going to cut this little ring off.
Now if we put the cap on,
we can see that between the cap and this lip,
there is enough space for the air gun nozzle to fit,
and that's exactly where we want to drill a hole.
With this particular nozzle,
we're using a 3/16 inch drill bit.
[Music]
There we go.
We can see that the bottle now fits onto the end.
But before we put it on all the way,
we actually need to do a little bit more modification.
We need to make sure
that the sand is going to feed into this,
just the way we want.
What we need to do now is take a file and cut
a small rectangular hole into the metal tube,
and that's what the sand is going to feed into.
Our bottle will be attached upside down with the cap
on full of sand,
but we're not just going to cut a hole in the tops
so the sand falls in,
we actually don't want that much sand going in.
What we want to do is cut a hole in the bottom of the tube
so that the sand is drawn in by the force of air passing by.
There we go.
We've now carved a hole down into that metal tube.
And as you can see, it's on the bottom,
so all the sand will feed down through the bottle,
and get pulled in by the air rushing through the tube.
Now we've got our plastic bottle,
and if you look at the bottom,
you can see the hole that we carved into the metal tube.
And at this point,
we are just about ready to fill this thing up with sand
and give it a little test.
We're going to take a look at the two types of sand
that we're going to be trying out,
and I got to say,
I've used both of these before,
and they do both work.
So first we just have playground sand.
This is about the cheapest stuff you can get,
I think it's like three dollars and fifty cents for a bag of it.
It's--
I mean, it's just what you think of when you think of sand.
This is industrial quartz sand.
It's all pretty uniform in size, which is pretty nice.
And this is actually my favorite stuff to use.
Now, like I said, you can use the playground sand,
but sometimes,
there are larger little rocks and bits in it.
So if you're going to use it,
I recommend running it through a sieve or strainer,
and just save all of the finer grit sand.
Everything that comes through the sieve,
you should be just fine to use.
But the reason that we want to do this is these larger rocks
won't always fit through the hole
that we carved into the bottom of the metal tube,
and they can get in there
and then jam it up, and then your whole thing will get stuck,
and it's pretty hard to clean out.
So you definitely want to run it through a sieve
if you're going to be using the playground sand.
This sand, it really doesn't matter
because as I said,
it's pretty much all the same size.
There might be some larger grains,
but for the most part,
you can see it all just goes right through the sieve.
I'm just going to take some of this quarzt sand,
and fill our bottle about halfway.
So right now, it's just shooting out air.
The sand isn't going to get to the gun.
But if I turn this upside down,
it now can start feeding the sand into the gun.
When it's under high pressure,
you can't really see it very well.
I mean obviously, you can see it some,
and I'm turning it upside down
because if it gets too low of pressure,
then all of the sand gets sprayed out.
It's kind of wasteful on the sand,
so usually, I'm spraying--
I just like to turn it over before I stop
so I don't just have a lot of wasted sand.
This sand is really sharp and really hard,
and it's going to be moving very quickly and bouncing back
toward me off of whatever it is I'm sandblasting,
so I need to have a lot of personal protection equipment.
I'm not just gonna use glasses,
but I'm actually going to use this full face mask, and then,
while I'm using sand in this,
I'm also going to be using a respirator,
because of the sand can break and create dust,
and I don't want to be breathing any of that in.
We're not using a sand blasting cabinet here.
It's just out in the open, so I'm going to have
a respirator as well as the facemask,
and I'm going to be wearing thick leather gloves.
[Music]
You can see how much that sand has really marked up the glass.
This is permanent.
This isn't something that's going to wash off.
The sand actually chipped away tiny tiny bits of the glass,
leaving the surface rough like this.
Something you can absolutely feel as well as see.
This just feels kind of like a rough sandpaper
or ceramic at this point.
It's unlikely that most people are going
to want to put a freehand random design onto a cup.
So now we're going to take a look at
how we can make a mask for this, and it's pretty simple.
It just involves duct tape.
We've now taken the duct tape
and we've masked off pretty much the whole cup,
which is just what we want,
because now, we can cut the design that we like
out of this part here,
and only that part will get engraved.
How you make your mask is up to you.
We're just using some paper, some duct tape,
and exacto knives.
If you have access to a vinyl cutter,
you might be able to make some pretty fancy designs.
[Music]
Using a sandblaster on wood can create a really
cool-looking effect that you've probably seen before,
without even really knowing what it was.
When you mask off your letters or design,
and then sandblast the rest,
it really brings out the grain of the wood
because the softer parts of the would get eaten away faster,
and the harder parts in the grain stay behind.
There are a few things we need to change however.
The wood, while softer is also much bouncier,
and it has a harder time
being eaten away the same way that the glass and the metal do.
So we need to turn up the pressure
on our sandblaster by quite a bit.
However, when we do that,
it has a tendency to eat right through the duct tape,
so we can't use that as a mask.
Instead of the duct tape,
we're going to be using something much thicker.
This is shower pan liner.
It's designed for going underneath your shower
in the bathroom to prevent
any humidity or leaked water from getting into the wood.
It's a pretty thick rubber,
and it comes in these big whole sheets.
You buy it by the foot.
This whole sheet, 1 foot of it,
was I think about three dollars and fifty cents,
somewhere around there,
and this is enough to do a lot with.
To attach this,
we're going to prep the wood surface by sanding
it nice and smooth,
and then I'm going to use just some spray adhesive on the back
of our cutout design on the rubber,
and attach that to the wood.
When your sandblasting wood,
you are going to need a much higher pressure.
For the glass and steel, we had it between 20 and 40 PSI.
We want a lot more than that for the wood.
Now, it's at between 80 and 100 PSI.
[Music]
That's amazing.
To make it a little bit easier to carve into,
we did use base wood.
That's something you can just pick up pretty much
any hobby store.
It's not too expensive,
and it does an easier job of carving all the way
around than some other things.
But this pine 2x4 actually worked out pretty nicely too.
I really like how it brought the grain out,
and it's interesting.
It didn't just leave like stripes in it.
It's actually sort of a tiered stair-step effect.
What level of difficulty would you say this project is?
I mean, if you have an air compressor,
not at all.
This is pretty cool, and the fact
that you can engrave and etched glass, steel,
and wood is really neat.
Hey guys, you've probably noticed that since we introduced
Calli in our Captain America shield video,
every new video has had secret codes,
and graphic glitches,
and other secret elements hidden into it.
Keep track of what you see,
and the timestamps of when you see it.
We've got some big prizes to give away,
and finding the codes might make you our next winner.