Need help with my cheap, piece of crap HF sandblaster!

so heres the bottom valve on my blaster, you can see the clean out bung on the bottom, there is no venturi, the handle of the media flow control valve is just the right hight i can use my foot to turn it on and off, so i turn on my air first then with my foot turn on the media, i've used this blaster for many years now, once i forgot to take it in one night and it got rained on, i still managed to use the media, copper slag, by taking the lower bung out 10 times or more, another problem i had was a mouse skull pluged the hole in the bottom of the tank, that little sucker made me drain the media all out, i have never used a blaster of any type large or small that hasent pluged up once in awhile.

 

i have the same blaster and have used it in the middle of the summer outside inhumid south florida hot air and did my chassis with no problems. is the lid with the handle sealing properly? remove some of those dryers probably too much restriction. all i used was playsand from homo depot. it was wet so i spread it out real thin on a plastic sheet in the sun in a few hours it was dry as could be. worked fine for me

 

if its playsand spread that bad boy on the floor and dry out the moisture out. i done it, works well. i blasted 2 fenders,they came out nice.

 

I use mine with a $5 filter and it works fine but I also use blasting sand from the masonry supply house. I read up a bunch on these and there were a couple of cases where the supply bung on the bottom had been either clogged by manufacturing debris or was way too small to begin with. One guy had your symptoms and drilled out the bung/nipple whatever you want to call it and the problems went away.

 

UPDATE:
I GOT IT!!!!!

It was all valve manipulation! Simply a matter of cracking the red handled valve, near the gauge, to allow about 60 lbs of air as opposed to opening it fully. Basically, too much air flowing through the blast hose. When I crack it the gauge holds at around 60-65 psi instead of dropping to 40. That's enough to work rather well. I depress the deadman handle and once air is flowing and holding at 60, then I crack the sand valve just enough to introduce sand into the stream. I just finished blasting my wishbones in 10 minutes! I'm happy now! Thanks to all you HAMBer's for the advice and info ya'll provided! Very grateful! Now I can clean all this crap up and get ready for the build in September!

 

Good to see you fixed it.

PS, after some time, you will get better at the sand valve setting as far as wasting sand. Too much sand really blasts FAST, but is wasteful $$....and too little sand makes the job go way too slow.