Blast finishing with a manual blast cabinet can speedily remove lightly attached burrs from complex parts and many less accessible areas of a component by precision impact and can successfully eliminate labour-intensive hand deburring altogether.
Blasting deburrs by impact, so if a burr is very firmly attached to the parent material, it may not be a good candidate for blast treatment. It is usually a mistake to try to use harsh abrasive blast media to wear a burr down or to abrade away the material of the component until the burr falls off. In the most efficient blast deburring process, the work is done by a particle with sufficient mass and velocity to knock the burr off and cleanly break it free from the edge.
Blast media has the ability to penetrate narrow openings, tight recesses and fine details that might be difficult to access by other means. Blasting can be done selectively, so that impact treatment is concentrated on specific areas of the component that are predictably the site of burrs from automatic machining processes.
Non-abrasive blast media such as plastic beads can effectively remove burrs without the slightest alteration of adjacent surfaces that may already have the desired finish. If your purposes includes cosmetic finishing, texturing or preparation of component surfaces for another downstream process, in addition to the removal of burrs, then blasting can frequently accomplish both tasks in a single operation. Some of the blast media used for surface finishing also has the ability to remove burrs as well as provide a desired finish.
