Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Mike Huggins. I’m with SPE North America. I’m in charge of North American sales for Shoblasters and Scarifiers.

What makes using a shot blaster desirable over using a grinder?

When look at a comparison between grinding and shot blasting when prepping the floor, shot blasting is often much faster than grinding is. Especially in large areas, you’re able to cover a lot more area quicker than you would with a grinder.

Another interesting aspect or feature of shot blasting versus grinding is that it’s not dependent on the surface, where different types of concrete surfaces can exist where there’s undulations or there’s high spots and low spots. The shot blaster is not restricted by those.

Typically one pass will still get into the crevices and highs and lows of a surface. That’s a really positive and unique feature of shot blasting.

Tooling is probably one of those things that you should consider. The consumables on grinding would be diamond tooling, and the consumables on a shot blaster would be the steel shot that you use.

In comparison to diamond tooling and steel shot, you’re obviously going to have a cost savings with steel shot.

Another thing too, to consider when you’re using diamond tooling, is that you’ll often have to use various types of diamond tolling for the different types of finishes or the different types of surface prep that you require. With shot, you can control all of that with your speed, and with the amount of shot that you use. If you want, you can also increase the size of the shot in order to get a different profile. Even that still ends up being much more cost effective than diamond tooling.

Another big difference between grinding and shot blasting is the fact that less dust is going to be creating with shot blasting. You’re going to be able to blast up debris and shot with a lot less dust in the air. You can control your dust with grinding but still some dust is going to be in the area when you’re working on the project. And so that’s one of the nice differences and features between shot blasting and grinding.