ready for wet sand blasting

Well today was to be the day for the David Brown 30C Cropmaster to get wet sand blasted. But it started to drizzle and that put it all on hold. This guy puts an acid in the water to slow down the surface rust and I need a dry day to put the primer on.
Next day is in 2 weeks, apparently HRH Lizzy is not having a birthday long weekend next week.

This is the pile of parts that make up a Cropmaster and a pic of an hours work cleaning up the front grille badge. It had both a little bit of red paint (normal) on it but also had blue (not normal). I think but cannot confirm that this tractor spent some time in either the Navy or Air Force hence the correct blue on parts of the tractor. It is now back to the original chrome and I am fairly pleased with the result.
More rain today so glad it didn't get blasted yesterday.

Still playing around with the fiddly bits while waiting for the sand blasting to happen hopefully next weekend. I ended up buying new bonnet clips and cleaned up the original ones I had and sold them to contribute to these new ones. The old ones were not a full set and there was one odd one out so new ones made there way here. When they arrived I was not happy with the paint on them so they too got a fresh coat of paint.

How a simple 'clean it up' job becomes somewhat more involved.
Today was all about cleaning up the radiator with the shroud still attached. All was going well until I thought I will remove the shroud and do a better job of the cleaning. I removed the screw on radiator cap to lift the shroud up and passed it and noticed a filthy mess inside. I always have run anti freeze in the radiator which has stopped me from viewing the cores. So in a way this is good as I will now take it off to be cleaned out properly even though this has never gone near running warm never mind hot.

Hopefully , tomorrow is the big day for the wet blasting and has been confirmed with the man. So this morning we took a run up the coast buy the 2pac paint for the top coat. Our local shop that sold Hi Chem paints is closing down and he has let his stock run low for that reason so I could not buy another 4 litre can of super etch primer or get my paint mixed up. The original colour was called Hunting Pink, readily available in the UK but so easy to get here now.
When talking to the paint shop up north I asked if he had the formula as he did make some a few years back but it was lost again. Since that phone call a couple of weeks back and to now he researched it with his paint supplier who did find the formula for an acrylic paint then they tweaked it to be a 2pac paint. The owner of the paint shop kindly offered to mix a small sample pot to show me the result, BINGO, bloody perfect so he then mixed a 4litre can of that and with the 2 litres of catalyst will make 6 litres plus some thinners so should be enough to do the job.
Now I wont be able to sleep tonight in anticipation of some progress at last. I will take some pics of the process for those who are interested.

Interested

Me too!

Eye

Cob a d, EMNTK. ... what is this wet sandblasting, sounds like an improve on breathing/making silica dust, but what is the trick, I thought fine dry sand was needed to allow it to be blasted.

Please explain :blink:

Well it all happened today the lot blasted and the tractor skid is now in primer with all the other bits waiting until tomorrow. The anti rust stuf he puts in the water does not stop surface rust on cast iron and is why I got stuck into spraying the skid.
Wet blasting uses a bloody big compersssor connected to a large hopper that holds both water and grit. In this case he used a coarse glass grit on the skid and a finer one on the tin ware and wheels etc. It certainly keeps the dust down and cleans off the crap fairly quickly. The lot was done in around 3 hours and 8 bags of grit and around 200 litres of water.
I took pictures and will post them up tomorrow as I'm totally stuffed and need to crawl off to the kennel for a big kip.