Having a blast

Armed with a mates sand blasting cabinet I try to make my RD look a bit less crusty

Sand blasters are great at removing crusty old paint from bits and in doing so they also rough the surface up a bit which is good for paint adhesion. If I were to paint I would need to give everything a really good clean after blasting.

Or, if you prefer bare metal, you get a nice satin finish which looks great on my stock top yolk. I only took some sandpaper to the old handle bar mount to give a little contrast. I did have the option of a soda blaster but I considered it too weak to be effective for this job.

The heads and barrels were also pretty grotty and needed a good going over with the sand blaster.
Unlike the top yolk, which was pretty straight forward, the fin of the heads and barrels were a right pain in the ass to blast.
This was not helped by a number of factors:

1. The sand blasting cabinates gloves were in poor shape with one palm almost completely missing. I did eventually get a new set from eBay which made life loads easier but in the mean time rubber glove helped.
2. the compressor wasn't up to the job. I own a mid level 11/250 compressor from machine mart which fills quickly but lacks the capacity for continuous sand blasting. This resulted me doing things in short runs with breaks in between. This was soul sappingly dull.
3. The compressor nozzle was too thick to get into every gap. luckily I wasn't looking for perfection, just an improvement.
4. the media I was using was old and mixed. as such the hopper would not flow well and hoses would become blocked. I figured out a nice flow of blowing pipes through at the end of each run but this took a while of pointlessly blowing air at things first.
5. I couldn't see a bloody thing! dust quickly covered the perspex window so much of what I was doing was guesswork. 

As you can see I slowly worked my way through my problems.
I'd recommend buying fresh media which I would have done if I wasn't such a tight ass. A bigger compressor would have been nice too but the smaller tank managed.

I did take care to not spray any machined surfaces. I would be using gaskets but there was no reason to make them work too hard by being lazy.

In the end a couple of broken afternoons spent spraying sand at my progressively more and more exposed fingers paid off and the parts came up fairly nicely.
With the barrels cleaned up I ported them then sent them off for a re-bore and skim at Grampians. As such the engine looks fairly good which when compared to the rest of the bike does not say a lot.

You will get to see that soon.