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Bob's Blasting Service is Chicagoland's Premier "mobile" soda blasting company. Our team focuses a great deal on car restorations, fire and mold remediation. Baking Soda seems to be the best media for this area specifically. In response to customer requests, we have added three different abrasive medias to our blasting line-up. Although baking soda blasting (sodium bicarbonate) remains our main focus, we now have the capabilities to "shoot" almost any type of media.

Bob's Blasting Service

What this means to our customers is that we can now offer almost any type of substrate profile and we can produce "white metal" on most rusty projects. As a bonus, we can soda blast over the abrasive blasted surface to retard flash rust and buy you some time before you need to clean and prime the surface.

Why Choose Soda Blasting?

"After all," you might be thinking, "I just want to strip some paint/surface rust/grease/bacteria/mold/smoke from this old thing."

To get a good idea of why soda blasting is so good, it might help to understand a bit about how the action of soda blasting is different from other types of blasting. To understand how it is different let’s take a look at sand blasting.

We want to remove paint from a fender, let's look at a simplified version of the structure of what we are cleaning. There's not too much to it. You have the metal coated with a layer of paint, in this case, red paint. The paint is thin-thin, only 7 thousandths of an inch thick.

Bob's Blasting Service

Let's pretend we are going to remove the paint by Sand Blasting. Think about it from the perspective of the paint. That's right we are going to project rocks that are 3 times larger than the thickness of the paint at the fender at a high velocity. The sand is denser than the paint too. The force of the impact smashes and chops through the paint. The sand is harder than the metal as well. Any of the impact force that was not dissipated by the paint is now whacking the metal. Remember this is a thick, steady stream of sand. There is a lot of sand battering the bare metal and the surface ends up pitted and rough. The metal is stripped bare with only a dusting of the pulverized sand covering its scarred surface. Within hours, the ambient moisture in the air will begin to attack the metal and the process of oxidation (rust) will begin.

I tell you, the thought of doing that to my fender is scarier than a Stephen King Movie. Imagine what would be happening to my poor fender if it were made of glass or wood or brick!

Now let's take a look at what happens when I strip the paint with Soda Blasting. I will assume we are going to use the 100% pure soda blast media sold by us in a Buster Blaster soda blasting system. Why? Because all there is in a bag of our blast media is sodium bicarbonate. Nearly the same stuff as in a box of baking soda from the grocery store, only it is manufactured differently so the crystals are a much larger, more consistent size. Other brands of blasting soda have smaller crystals and they add dusty stuff to the soda, like calcium carbonate or tri-calcium phosphate to make up for shortcomings. We knew what to look for in a baking soda media, and when we found it we looked no further.

A crystal of our blast media is huge compared to the layer of paint. But sodium bicarbonate is much softer and less dense than sand but it is still a bit harder than the paint so it can penetrate the paint layer just a bit and this is when the magic happens. Baking soda has a property called "high friability" do you remember that kid in your grade school class that would go all to pieces laughing any time someone made a joke about flatulence? Sodium bicarbonate is just like that. It loves to go to pieces, that's what friability is. The bicarbonate crystal gets a little into the paint and breaks up. But it doesn't just crumble, it explodes! All of the energy that was projecting the Soda at the paint is released outward and all of the bits and pieces of the crystal are carried along. Ripping and shredding into the paint. But, still, the metal is harder than the soda. It isn't affected at all by that battle going on at its surface. What else is harder than Sodium Bicarbonate? Glass, plastic, chrome, rubber, gaskets. Let's face is, Sodium Bicarbonate is that hardest-working wimp you will ever have the pleasure to work with!

When it's all done and my fender is clean there is an additional benefit to soda blasting. The bare, smooth metal has a light dusting of Sodium Bicarbonate. The dust is alkaline. For rust to form there needs to be a slightly acidic pH. The alkalinity neutralizes any acidic component of the air and protects the metal! Pretty cool, huh? Soda Blasting has the same effect when cleaning off mold damage. Molds, and bacteria too, need an acidic environment to survive. When you soda blast you are creating a safe, sterile surface. Still- I'm not going to eat lunch off of my fender!

With my fender stripped of paint, I can now clean and neutralize it with Hold Tight 102 and paint it a new color. The dust from the soda blasting can be rinsed off, it will dissolve in water. If there are any bits stuck in crevasses, they too will dissolve and rinse away. If I had sand blasted, I would have to rinse and wipe and wipe and rinse. I would have to take extra care to make sure there was no grit left in any crevasses. Imagine all of that uncomfortable grit left over from sand blasting. Little bits grinding into your floor, in the seams of your clothing, stuck between your teeth. When it comes to final clean up, Baking Soda being water soluble is a blessing. You can only get so much with a broom, being able to easily rinse away any remaining dust is a huge time saver!

Bob's Blasting Service

Cleaning anything with soda blasting is a vastly superior process . You can easily remove carbon, grease, oils, gasket material, surface corrosion, paint and coatings from a variety of alloys, plastics and composites without substrate damage or distortion, and leave hard anodized coatings intact.

When you are soda blasting you are saving time by cleaning, de-greasing and de-painting all in one step. What better paint preparation could there be?

Soda Blasting Facts

In the past, the only way you could remove paint or some other unsightly material from a contaminated surface, was to either chip it off, sand blast it, use harsh chemicals, sand it until your arm fell off or your equipment failed. In most cases, after these time consuming, or hazardous methods are discarded, the final solution was just to paint over it and hope no one noticed.

There is now a process, known as Soda Blasting, where a surface is cleaned or paint is removed or coatings of any kind are stripped from a substrate both efficiently and safely. It is very similar to traditional sand blasting yet has the significant advantage of cleaning the surface without causing any harm to the substrate or the environment.

Applications

From the removal of graffiti from brick and concrete to the cleaning of boat bottoms, from the removal of carbon, char, and odors from buildings damaged by fire to refurbishing stainless steel kitchen equipment, from removing oil and grease from engines to removing offensive odors in stairwells, from cleaning washrooms in manufacturing facilities to removing paint from brick and steel, from removing surface rust and paint from cars to line removal off highways, the soda blasting approach has proved to be successful time and time again. The system has been used for:

  • Paint Removal
  • Engine Parts
  • Brick & Concrete
  • Hard Wood
  • Odor Elimination
  • De-paint Boat Bottoms
  • Anilox Rolls
  • Line Removal
  • Surface Rust Removal
  • Cars-Paints/Surface Rust
  • Stain Removal
  • Airplane Parts
  • Graffiti Removal
  • Fire & Mold Removal
  • Vehicle Restoration & Paint Removal
  • Fire Restoration
  • Marking Removal
  • And More!

Why Use This Approach?

  • Equipment is easy to use
  • Equipment is transportable, in many cases a one-man operation
  • Set-up time is short
  • Media is environmentally sensible (USDA Approved as an A1 cleaner)
  • Media is water soluble, gentle yet effective
  • Media is safer than solvents, caustics and acids
  • Media is an odor-eater
  • Clean up is relatively easy