and they are currently on sale for $200 off and since they are built in Ohio, we can get free freight delivery.
Those cabinets are built for larger work than our current cabinet, can natively handle larger media, have sealed gloves and a big window making it much easier to work and maneuver. They also don’t spray grit out of random slots all over the cabinet like our current one…
How much interest would there be in one of these?
(inB4 Harbor Freight recommendation - those cabinets and siphon guns are absolute crap… to get consistent media feed from them you essentially have to replace 100% of the mechanicals in the cabinet, and then you are still left with a system that has no filtration, so you are killing your lungs every time you use it or walk near it after it has been used)
I think the argument has been, we have have all the parts that can be scabbed from the existing cabinet to replace all the bits on a cheap cabinet. All we really need is a new metal box that is a useful size.
I went in early this morning and used the current sand blasting cabinet and… yeah, it sucked. My work is 33" just barely fit in it diagonally. I would probably support this if it came up for a vote and included several sizes/types of grit.
Will, I was an advocate of that approach for a while… but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a pain in the ass to get something still kinda shitty… the “nice” gun in that cabinet and all it’s supporting infrastructure is too small for most media or for reasonable media flow rates for large parts. the replacement gun that is in there now is a crappy chinese import gun that the siphon only half works half the time, and the gun is huge. it also doesn’t work with the foot pedal control. The air filter system on the cabinet would potentially be useful in another cabinet, but the way it’s designed it woudl take up a huge amount of space if adapted to another cabinet… just overall a lot of work for a frankenstein that may or may not work well…
That said, if someone else felt like putting in the effort, I’d not stop them.
I think my main concern is, we have been spending a lot recently. We are currently spending $2k+ in laser repairs. Spent $700 on Hose Reels. Spending $300 the vinyl cuter.
That is 3k in the last month and there are other things in the works.
Adding another $1500 to that bill seems ill advised currently, even though we have all been saying how much we hate that cabinet box.
I totally get this. I haven’t been around long enough to have a good feel for the burn of capital and how much you can actually regard procurements and repairs as actual investments in growing membership and utilization. I doubt if a new sand blasting chamber would cause a stampede of new members. But I’d certainly let this go up for a vote.
I wasn’t implying that it can’t get proposed for a vote. You can propose anything for a vote. I was explaining why I would be voting against it at this time, if it does get proposed as a vote.
The point of the 1 week timeframe between the proposal of a vote and the actual vote is so we can discuss how we should vote. Somethings we have discussed routinely for a few weeks and can get voted on immediately. I.e the vinyl cutter.
Other things have not been discussed in any meaningful way, so throwing a vote up before a discussion is ill-advised. Kevin is starting the discussion to make sure it happens before anyone casts a vote.
I can definitely get behind the thought that we might need to recover from other purchases before we make a purchase for something like this, I was really just bringing it up to gauge interest for the future. I am not willing to lead another purchase till the ones I have open are done.
I am unclear if you are saying 35% of annual whatever is a lot or a little… haha
I would not say that is a lot of work. It is a bunch of small 20 min projects and can be handled by a lot of people.
Any one in the hive could caulk the various seals or add the Tee off airgun.
*It wouldn’t be hard for someone to make a plywood base with castors, or assemble the dust collector because I know we have one of those tornado collectors floating around the hive. I have see it several times.
*Swapping out the lighting is easy for anyone with basic home wiring experience, and a great way to teach anyone that wanted to learn.
*The latch modification is done with a piece of wire, but would also be an opportunity for Brad to spend 3 hours machining a beautiful latchpin on the lathe ( he seems to love those projects)
*The siphon tube requires the most “modification work” and that is not complex. And rick and I could easily but that out any night we are working on the cart.
So for an order of magnitude less the the fancy one, we’d have a piece of equipment that was an order of magnitude superior to our existing one.