How I Made a Sandblasting Hood

Overview

To media blast safely, you need the following:

​1) ​eye protection

​2) sand in nooks and crannies you didn't know you had protection

​3) ​respiratory dust protection

When sandblasting smaller parts inside an enclosure​, the enclosure provides 1, 2, and most of 3.

​When sandblasting bigger parts, you are right there in the enclosure with all of the sand. So, how to get the necessary protection?​

​1) ​eye protection: goggles or face shield

​2) sand in nooks and crannies you didn't know you had protection: some kind of fabric covering​

​3) ​respiratory dust protection: necessary, even if you use "silica free" blast media. any p100 filter (pink respirator cartridge) will do the trick.

​These 3 protections are usually provided by a sandblasting hood. However, all of them that you can buy are either very expensive or unsafe.

(If you're interested, this is because commercial blasters use a supplied air hood (expensive) and all of the cheap sandblasting hoods for sale do not include or are incompatible with respirators (they fog up))

​This post is about my approach to achieving all 3 economically. In fact I didn't have to buy anything for this because all of the components are useful for other tasks.

Things I Used

• flip up face shield (preferably one with a frame like this)
• old sheet
• elastic
• adhesive backed velcro
• respirator with p100 filter
• plastic hose

​Making it​

When I made my hood, I started with a flip up face shield. I then created a perimeter "gasket" around it with adhesive backed velcro. My velcro faced outward on top and inward on the bottom. Cutting notches in the velcro helped it curve a little on the top. On the bottom the curves were too tight so I used little pieces to form the curve​.

I chose velcro because I still wanted to be able to use the face shield without the hood.

​

I didn't take any pictures of the next steps, oops:

The next step was to attach the corresponding velcro to the velcro on the flip up face shield. 

Then I pinned that velcro to my fabric. This was the trickiest part - getting the fabric to fit the 3d shape. When I was happy with it,​ I made sharpie "alignment marks" for future attachment.

I don't think it matters too much what type of fabric you use. I used lightweight cotton f​rom an old sheet.

After I was happy with how the fabric was pinned to the velcro, I carefully ripped the velcro off from the face shield, leaving it pinned to the fabric. I then sewed the velcro in place.

After it was sewed I cut out the face shield​ circle inside of the velcro.

Then I basically had a hole in the middle of a sheet. To make that fit a person, I reattached it to the face shield and draped it over an unsuspecting bystander:

and proceeded to pin it in place. Then I sewed those pinned areas.

When I was happy enough with that, I cut the bottom of it to length and sewed on some elastic. 

The last step was to sew on some underarm loops. Mine are simple pieces of elastic through an adjustable buckle.

When I tried it while wearing a respirator, I got fog on the inside of the face shield. 

My solution was to attach a hose to the exhaust hole of the respirator so that exhaled moisture would go outside the hood.

Recommendations

If you want to make one like I made with a face shield, I would recommend getting a face shield with a frame like this one. Unfortunately I did not do this, so my velcro is attached to a consumable piece. So when my plastic lens is scratched up I will be up the creek...

If you want an extended respirator exhaust, it is best to get a respirator with a bit of plastic there to glue to. The North brand respirators work well for this because they have a clip on plastic piece to glue to. The respirator works fine without the plastic piece there.

​

Other ways to do a similar thing worth considering:

• use goggles instead of a face shield and sidestep the fog issue entirely
• use a full face respirator (they deal with the fog issue internally) and sew a hood around that​