[generalcrafts]

As the title said, is there a magical periodic process or constant removal system that really works, and may work with our machines? I don't mean just work, but work really, really well with little headaches. A little back story. We have a couple Flow Mach III machines which run nearly 7 hours each day. In the past, once the garnet gets pretty full we would have a company come in with a backhoe and scoop it out. It takes about a day and $1200. The problem with the backhoe is, they keep banging up the ceiling, freshly renovated, btw, hitting the tank (causing it to move and need repositioned), and when they are done, leave a mess all over the place, requiring a few extra hours of cleanup. That got old, so we decided to try to have a pump truck come out and suck up the garnet. That seemed to work pretty well, about a day, and roughly the same cost. The 2nd time they came out they charged us $2500, and said that the steel drops gave them a bunch of problems and put holes in their flex tubes. We don't really have room for a big retrofit extraction system like a conveyor system. We really can't have anything in the tank, due to the nature of what we cut. We often have jigs setup which only cut around a small area for hours and hours, it would eventually cut through anything below it. We were almost ready to give the Barton removal wand a shot, but someone from Flow said to stay away from them, I can't seem to find any discussion or reviews on this system. Anyone have a system that works well, I'd like to hear of them!?
-Mike

[alexhawker]

Where are you located? We've only had our tank pumped once, but we paid $1,400, and the three guys seemed to be pros - they say they do a few companies' water jets.

In terms of drops, they had a screen on the hose that caught larger stuff - they even returned to me a bunch of clamps and tools that had fallen into the tank.

How frequently are you emptying the garnet out? And how large is your table?


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[generalcrafts]

Where are you located? We've only had our tank pumped once, but we paid $1,400, and the three guys seemed to be pros - they say they do a few companies' water jets.

In terms of drops, they had a screen on the hose that caught larger stuff - they even returned to me a bunch of clamps and tools that had fallen into the tank.

How frequently are you emptying the garnet out? And how large is your table?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yeah, I thought about fabricating a screen for the end of their hose, that would take care of one problem. I think they didn't like getting in the tank and breaking up the compacted garnet with a shovel/pressure washer. We have it pumped out probably twice per year. We have a 5x12 table, and just got another Flow with a 4x8 table. Not really sure we want to invest in a "wand" type system, I don't see any reviews on it. They say they will come out and give a demonstration, however I don't feel it will show how well it gets the harder compacted layer at the bottom since they will probably only do it for a few minutes.

[alexhawker]

Well, let me know if you end up finding a better solution. I would see if you can shop around and maybe find a cheaper vendor with a pump truck.

[masterjetter]

Well, let me know if you end up finding a better solution. I would see if you can shop around and maybe find a cheaper vendor with a pump truck.

For the same price as a yearly clean out (you quoted 1500 to get it pumped) you can buy a slurry pump and pump it out yourself. To get the hard to handle stuff off at the bottom create a program that runs between slats and stirs up the bottom and run it with an empty table and quality of water only. Saves a lot of money in the long run. Our company also in the process of building a sifting machine to recycle most of the sand we have gotten from cleanouts. 4 stages of filters and a magnet to remove filings. Still a bit of tweaking to do before the sand can be ran again but it will save a ton in the long run!

[alexhawker]

For the same price as a yearly clean out (you quoted 1500 to get it pumped) you can buy a slurry pump and pump it out yourself. To get the hard to handle stuff off at the bottom create a program that runs between slats and stirs up the bottom and run it with an empty table and quality of water only. Saves a lot of money in the long run. Our company also in the process of building a sifting machine to recycle most of the sand we have gotten from cleanouts. 4 stages of filters and a magnet to remove filings. Still a bit of tweaking to do before the sand can be ran again but it will save a ton in the long run!

I was under the impression that using the abrasive once knocks off the majority of the sharp corners, meaning it can't generally be reused - is that just said to sell more garnet?

[Szajber]

Hi, i've made such system for garnet removal myself. It works quite well. One pipe mix the clean water the other one take garnet out of the tank. It's combined with 2 pumps and an old liquid glass 1000l tank with empty garnet bag inside. Every 5-8 hours we are repleacing bags. Once a year I'm cleaning the whole tank cause of steel debris inside. Sorry for my bad english

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