Does anyone have experience or know of someone who has done DIY (do-it-yourself) Dry Ice Blasting? I have a few ideas. The local gas (not gasoline but welding and medical gas) supplier sells a 50 pound tank of CO2 for $50. That will make a lot of dry ice which I could crush or cut into smaller chips. They also sell dry ice pellets. I know that you can hire someone to come out and dry ice blast anything for you but I’m not convinced that it can’t be done with standard or slightly modified blasting equipment. Any ideas?
A couple of things that’s keep in mind about CO2. You can get the CD50T which pulls liquid CO2 from the bottom of the cylinder. It’s super cold and you have to have a way of dispersal without getting a terrible static electric shock. I can’t imagine using a 50lb cylinder for what you’re suggesting. I’ve had a valve go bad on my liquid transfer pump letting the liquid co2 escape. The liquid co2 transformed into a gas rather quickly.
Steven
I suspect that is not the weight of the gas but of the cylinder. If I am correct, that is not going to make a lot of dry ice. And I think to make dry ice you need super duper refrigeration, dry ice is super cold. I do not think it can be made without specialized equipment.
Bob the 50lb (CD50T) cylinder I use for filling Co2 fire extinguishers is quite heavy. I swear when I move one it feels like it’s full of lead. But I do agree with you it might not make much dry ice. I watched a video on youtube of dry ice blasting and the storage vessel is not shown. I imagine they are using a 750 lb tank/cylinder. I’m not sure but I’m basing my guess of the length of the videos.
Steven
Thanks 1969XR7Vert for your input. I would really like to get some discussion going on this topic. Actually I called the company and they say that the the 50 pounds is just the gas. The full tank weighs over 100 pounds. And like you I also thought that special equipment was needed to make dry ice but then I watched this program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldsk301JXNg They do use huge presses to compact the dry ice into dense blocks but you can also make a low-density version of dry ice with a CO2 tank or even a CO2 fire extinguisher. When the gas is released from the tank it looses so much heat that it turns to solid if you have some way of confining it to a small space. It turns out that a cloth bag does the trick. Check out this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CchjDq2W4cw.
You can buy the kit for $68 on ebay. Penguin® Dry Ice Maker Basic - U.S.A Standard valve CGA320 Original ISO-9001 | eBay
So I’m still hoping to come across someone who has at least tried this.
Interesting Jon!
Used to deliver Co2. Both with the big tank on the truck (ever see a guy hooking up a hose to the side of a restaurant? Now you know what they’re doing) and cyl. too. Yes a true 50lb bottle will weigh over 100 lbs. I don’t think you’ll get much dry ice from it. Having serviced those system I can tell you that it turns into a gas as soon as you open the valve and the cloud of by product and dry ice will be pretty much everywhere. I think there are much more efficient ways to strip the body and collecting the by product you are trying to get.
I respect your creative process in an effort to save money. That type of approach does find better ways to do things, but in this case, I think I would factor in what your time is worth and maybe find other areas to save money.
I’ve been there and done that. I forgot to close my 3way valve when I was filling a 20lb CO2 extinguisher and I emptied the CD50T cylinder quickly. One heck of a cloud and little bits of dry ice all over my scale and service counter. I had to wait for a couple of minutes for the cloud of CO2 to clear out of my shop before I could switch out cylinders and get back to work.
Steven
Hey Guitar74! Thanks for your input. It’s nice to hear from someone with CO2 experience. Actually the guy from the factory in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldsk301JXNg#t=3m45s said that letting liquid CO2 out of a tank produces 45% solid and 55% gas if you confine it to a small volume. So from 50 pounds of liquid CO2 I’d only get 23 pounds of dry ice. Did you take a look at this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CchjDq2W4cw
I’ll admit that I have become frustrated in the past with people who are always trying to pinch pennies everywhere. I don’t wanna be that guy so I’ll have to consider your recommendation seriously. Actually I have been thinking that I should just buy pellets and rent a real dry ice blaster instead of messing around trying to make one.
Regarding time, I’d like to point out 3 ways dry ice blasting saves time. 1. Before blasting I won’t have to put up plastic sheets in my garage to keep the media from going everywhere. That’s a big job. 2. After blasting I won’t have to do any cleaning up of media from the garage floor or take down plastic sheets. 3. After blasting I won’t have try to remove the media from every little nook and cranny of the car. I’ve heard of people getting media coming out of places even years after they did the blasting. So I would argue that dry ice blasting would save time if you consider these 3 points. Or were you suggesting I hire a company to come out and blast it for me for $1000 or more? I wasn’t quite sure from your comment.
Boeing reworks Apache helicopters at a facility in Mesa where a Cougar guy works. He tells me that Boeing developed the dry ice blasting process, or at least the one they use. It is cleaner than media but there will be little pieces of paint every where that has to be cleaned out. They have some pretty trick tools that they use to do that, it sounds like they have sort of a pulsed compressed air / vacuum wand. I have not seen it, and chances are it is a $100K machine, being they are Boeing and it is a governmnet contract for many hundreds of helicopters worth many many millions of dollars…
Jonathan I have access to 50lbs of liquid CO2 in my shop. When I get off shift at the Fire Dept this morning I’m going to do some testing of the dry ice blasting. I’ll snap some photos of my results.
Steven
I don’t wanna be that guy so I’ll have to consider your recommendation seriously. Actually I have been thinking that I should just buy pellets and rent a real dry ice blaster instead of messing around trying to make one.
Regarding time, I’d like to point out 3 ways dry ice blasting saves time. 1. Before blasting I won’t have to put up plastic sheets in my garage to keep the media from going everywhere. That’s a big job. 2. After blasting I won’t have to do any cleaning up of media from the garage floor or take down plastic sheets. 3. After blasting I won’t have try to remove the media from every little nook and cranny of the car. I’ve heard of people getting media coming out of places even years after they did the blasting. So I would argue that dry ice blasting would save time if you consider these 3 points. Or were you suggesting I hire a company to come out and blast it for me for $1000 or more? I wasn’t quite sure from your comment.
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I think if I were going to do it, I would rent a real dry ice blaster. THAT sounds like the ticket. I was actually trying to point out that you should consider your time worth something as you should consider it valuable (I use my going rate as a musician or motorcycle tech as I charge the same for either). Really the choice is yours, I was just trying to illustrate that if you spend hours trying to “make” a blaster and are unsuccessful then you have spent money and time on something that is a boat anchor (what usually happens when I’m trying to cut monetary corners) and your time and money could have been spent elsewhere.
Ok I gave the dry ice blasting a try with a 50lb cylinder and my liquid transfer pump. The results were less than stellar. I will post pictures later this afternoon showing the before and after.
Steven
A practical experiment, awesome Steven! 
Here are some pictures:
50lb Co2 Cylinder with syphon tube for liquid use.
Haskel liquid Co2 pump powered by nitrogen (Ni300)
1968 center grille section
Pictures continued:
Starting dry ice blasting, liquid Co2 starting to flow.
Liquid Co2 flowing and I start moving the nozzle toward the grille section.
Grille section after 30 seconds of flowing liquid Co2, no noticeable paint or rust removed.
Pictures continued:
Grille section thawing from liquid Co2 blasting.
Grille section thawed. Paint and rust still in place.
Jonathan my thoughts are confirmed from my earlier post. This home brewed / DIY method is not effective. I’m not saying that dry ice blasting does not work, I’m sure it does that is why there are videos showing the process. I am saying that this method surely does not. Maybe a commercial/store purchased system is the way to go. One thing is for sure. If you go the route I did today your clean up will go quickly because paint and or rust will still be on your Cougar parts. 
Steven
Hey 1967 S Code!
Wow, thanks for running your experiment and posting pictures. But I’m a little unclear exactly how you did it. You don’t show any pictures of the dry ice. It appears that you may have just blown CO2 gas on the part. That makes it very cold but won’t remove anything. What I was suggesting was a 3-step process.
- Make dry ice as shown in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CchjDq2W4cw I’m told a small cloth bag of any kind will work.
- Chop or crush the dry ice into small pieces (small enough to flow well through your sandblaster, maybe 1/16" or smaller) Some people use pellets which are compressed to make them heavier (higher density)
- Put this media in a sand blaster and see how it works.
Anyway I appreciate your contribution to the thread. Thanks so much.
Jonathan I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can. I hope this makes sense. Yes the cloud is Co2 gas, if thats all I wanted I would have used a Co2 extinguisher but that is not what I wanted. The part that is coming into contact with the grille section is “liquid co2” that is forming into “dry ice chips”. I used a “liquid CO2” pump discharging the liquid Co2 at 145psi. I’m holding the nozzle about 2 inches from the grille section. At this distance the liquid Co2 is indeed hitting the grille section as “dry ice chips”. The chips are about the size of 1/2 of a grain of rice (my bad I should have snapped a picture of the pieces all over the counter after bouncing off the grille section). So yes it’s really more than making the grille section just a cold piece of metal.
I could have captured the liquid Co2 into a “dry chemical extinguisher collection bag” or my metal containment hopper that I use when I service fire extinguishers. I could have then take it to the sand blaster after “breaking” the dry ice it into pieces (mine were again about the size of a 1/2 of a grain of rice, so I figured that was good), but that is more than I care to do. Again I’m not saying dry ice blasting doesn’t work. I am saying the 3 step DIY process might not give you the best “bang for your buck”. In the end it’s your car and how you choose to strip it has to work for you, regardless of what myself or others might think. Post pictures of your process when you get going, I’d like to see how it turns out.
Steven
I think you did a great job illustrating all the above, Steven. Like a lot of people, I too hoped it would work as I have some suspension pieces to clean up. Back to the blasting cab. Thanks for going through the trouble.