Sandblasting cabinet media pickup basket

So I bought a sandblasting cabinet and of course I started modifying it. One of the problems was media being stuck on any horizontal area. Surprisingly that included lower lid – a large portions of media were stuck on the slopes building upon lower lid. Also default pickup tube was sucking media around it's end and you either have to have a lot of media or you have to bang on the cabinet to make media fall to the pickup area.

I ended up dumping the lid altogether to get rid of as much horizontal areas as possible. Hence the combined center piece that funnels media down nicely.

The cup has 0.7 mm gap for some sort of foamy gasket installed, I used leftovers from the cabinet. Cup twists about 20 degrees and stays in place due to small detents at the end of track.

For the media pickup area and metering valve I tried several options and ended up with a large one and a big opening serving as metering valve. My experience was that it allowed the most amount of media being picked up by vacuum and large opening was necessary to allow higher reduction in amount of media being picked up for more stable flow. If you close the “metering valve”, media will periodically fill the tube completely, then vacuum will burst through it, you gun would spill a portion of media and then the cycle will repeat.