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G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M M A R C H 2 0 2 3 • G R A P H I C S P R O 6 9 Types of abrasive is is a relatively short list for the work most of us do on either glass, stone, or wood. It basically boils down to: sand, Aluminum Oxide, and Silicon Carbide. I have covered the types of abrasives in quite a few previous articles, so I won't go into a lot of detail here. e bottom line is that sand is the least desirable of them all because of its softness and coarseness. In general, it produces a very rough texture, can be used only once for a blasting pro- cess, and needs to be replaced frequently. A luminum Oxide is a harder abra- sive than sand but also has a tendency to round off its particles during re-use and has to be replaced with fresh material in certain time intervals, depending on the frequency of blasting. It also creates quite a bit of dust and static electricity during the blasting process. e top-of-the-line abrasive is Silicon Carbide for several reasons. It has a crys- talline structure and always breaks down into smaller pieces that stay sharp during the blasting process. is property allows for the re-use of the abrasive many times over compared with Aluminum Oxide. In other words, the particles get finer but not duller through blasting. If you compare Aluminum Oxide and Silicon Carbide simply by cost, then you are comparing apples to oranges. You can recycle Silicon Carbide so many more times than Aluminum Oxide that the per-pound cost does not do it justice; it is the cost per use cycle that gives the real comparison. We have used both abra- sives many times, and in the end estab- lished that Silicon Carbide may cost just around 40 cents more per use hour than Aluminum Oxide because of the many re-uses.