Blasting and Deburring
Macfab offers media blasting services, as well as part tumbling and de-burring as part of our one-stop solution. The CNC machining process can leave parts with burrs or sharp edges, chips, and tool marks. To ensure each part is produced to specification and ready to go directly to our customers’ production line, blasting, tumbling and de-burring methods are applied. Macfab has the experts, equipment, and processes to provide optimal solutions to meet your requirements.
Media Blasting Services
Media blasting is used to improve surface finish or to improve the surface hardness, or shot peening, of the part. Two types of media blasting services are available. Macro blasting, commonly called sand blasting is used on larger parts. Micro blasting is used for smaller parts where the stream of abrasive is smaller and more precise. Both methods require the same two ingredients, an abrasive media such as the sand, and clean, prepared, and pressurized to propel the sand at an object.
Part Tumbling
Part tumbling is used to remove sharp edges, burrs and smooth surface finish. These include conventional, magnetic and mass media tumbling. The benefits of part tumbling include lowers cost as large volumes of small parts can be tumbled at a time, much quicker and more uniform than manual deburring with hand tools, uniform appearance and finish, removes burr in cross holes and internal cavities are cleared and no residue left on the part.
Process Specification for Media Blasting
As media blasting can achieve two separate outcomes, it is important to have on the drawing notes on the expectation of reference to a specification.
Surface Hardness
Shot peening for surface hardness improvement, peening, is a cold working process that increases the surface hardness of a part. An Almen strip is commonly used to validate the process. This allows for validation of the part avoiding costly destructive validation costs.
Surface Finish
If the surface finish is being improved, a Ra (roughness average) or other surface finish method is typically specified on section of a part or the full part. A Ra of 5 µ is the finest possible with a consistent 150 µ possible. Macfab can verify the finishes with a profilimeter.
Macfab’s other operations include conventional, magnetic, and mass media deburring. More about these are below highlighting the value they bring to our customers.
Conventional Deburring
Burrs traditionally are removed by hand or with small tools such as a deburring tool or file. Macfab has tooling specialized for deburring parts that can used in their CNC to reduce the manual labor and achieve part consistency. This works well for just a couple of parts, however this process can take hours of intensive labour.
Magnetic Deburring
When machining small, non-ferrous precision parts, deburring may be necessary. Magnetic deburring removes burrs from the entirety of the part, including internal cavities, blind holes, cross holes, and threads.
This process, since it functions by way of the brushing motion of the small magnetic pins against the parts, also shines and polishes the parts. There is no residue left behind, nor any media left lodged inside the parts, so there is no need for an extra step in the process to clean the batch of parts.
Tumble Deburring
This process is also known as vibratory or tumble deburring. This process works well for high volume parts. It can used on a large range of materials, however depending on final part condition it might need a secondary process to clean off fluids used in the tumbler.
With many options available within these processes, Macfab’s experts will select the optimal process to achieve the results you require.
