16 Aug Micro Sandblast Deburring with Burr-Blast K™
Micro Sandblast Deburring with Burr-Blast K™
At CRYSTAL MARK, INC. de-burring with Micro Sandblasting, also known colloquially as “Bead Blasting”, is one of the oldest known applications for the technology. The new product Burr-Blast K™ has revolutionized this now mature technique. It is a unique blasting material with multiple emerging applications. On many alloys such as stainless steel, tool steels, titanium and nitinols it exhibits the unique ability to remove just the burrs and not gouge or change the surface or bulk of the parts dimensionally. This has proven to be a great cost saver to most machine shops working with these otherwise difficult to deburr materials. In particular on complicated micro machined parts where conventional deburring techniques prove to be excessively time consuming or delicate.
With CRYSTAL MARK, INC. equipment and Burr-Blast K™ a customer was able to de-burr intricately machined stainless steel parts in 45 seconds, where it was previously taking a worker 30 minutes of de-burring with a knife under a microscope. Other recent uses for the material include coating removal. Because this Burr-Blast K™ is soft, relative to other abrasives, it can used to remove coatings on harder metals, ceramics and glass type substrates .
Burr-Blast K™ has may other benefits as well. It is water soluble with a near neutral Ph. As such, parts can go straight into an aqueous wash, passivation or electro polish without any intermediate cleaning steps. Because Burr-Blast K™ is water soluble it is the perfect media for de-burring or surface treating medical devices and implants that are in current development. With a chemical composition similar to Epsom Salt it has the added benefit of being Non-Toxic and thus environmentally friendly. This makes it easy to dispose of spent material. Burr-Blast K™ can actually be used to fertilize plants such as tomatoes and peppers and the like.