How to hire a blasting company without getting burned
Every week someone calls us after a phone quote from a rig fifty miles away, and the worries are always the same. Can I trust the number. Will the blast wreck the surface. Is this even the right fix. This is the answer sheet we wish every caller had, including the honest part about the jobs we turn down. Run it on us, and run it on anybody else with a pot and a compressor.
Will blasting ruin my pool tile or warp my car panels?
Not if the operator matches media and pressure to the surface, and there is a simple way to verify that before the full job: the patch test. The physics are on your side. Calcium scale is softer than tile glaze, so fine glass bead carried in a water stream pops the white band off a waterline while the glaze underneath survives. The damage stories you read about come from the wrong setup, coarse media or full pot pressure on delicate glaze, pebble finish, or 1940s brick. That etches, and etching is permanent.
Same story in the garage. Dry blasting builds heat in sheet metal, and a hood or door skin that gets hot in one spot oil-cans and never sits flat again. The water in wet abrasive blasting keeps the panel cool while paint, filler, and rust come off, which is why we can take a full car body to bare metal without warping it. The details and prices are on our pool tile page and our cost page.
The verification is the patch test. On tile, old brick, or thin aluminum, a real operator blasts a small hidden spot at tuned pressure, shows you the result, and sets the rig to what the test says. An operator who will not do a test spot on delicate work is telling you how the whole job will go.
How do I know if a blasting company is legit?
Five checks separate a real outfit from a rented pot, and you can run all five in one phone call.
- Ask what media is in the pot. If the answer includes silica sand, hang up. Blasting with sand fills the air with respirable crystalline silica, the dust that causes silicosis. OSHA regulates that exposure tightly (OSHA on crystalline silica), and its abrasive blasting fact sheet tells operators to substitute less hazardous media wherever possible. Glass bead, crushed glass, soda, and garnet do the same work without the lung hazard, and the water stream in wet blasting knocks down whatever dust remains.
- Ask for the certificate of insurance. A legitimate rig carries general liability and can email the certificate the same day, before you book. GCs and property managers already know this one; homeowners should use it too.
- Get the price in writing. A number that exists only in a phone call can grow on the invoice. We publish our whole table on the cost page and quote from it. Any operator can at least text you the number and what it covers.
- Ask about containment and haul-out. Spent media plus whatever came off the surface leaves with the crew, every time. If the answer is a shrug, the mess and the stripped paint stay in your yard.
- Ask where the rig is based. Most operators serving Pinal County dispatch from Queen Creek, Gilbert, or Phoenix, and that drive is inside every quote somewhere. It is fair to ask who is actually local.
One licensing note. Blasting as a standalone cleaning service is not a licensed trade in Arizona, but when surface prep is part of contracted work on a structure, the Registrar of Contractors’ license classifications can apply to the project. A straight operator tells you when your job needs a licensed contractor of record. We do.
Match the symptom to the right fix
Half our calls open with a symptom, so here is the sorting table we run in our own heads. The middle rows are why: some of these are repairs, and some mean the material is already gone.
| What you see | What it usually is | The right call |
|---|---|---|
| White band on the pool waterline you can catch a fingernail on | Multi-year calcium scale from hard Pinal County water | Wet bead blast the tile line. Brushing and pumice stopped being an option a year ago. No retile needed. |
| Tile glaze already dull or matte, even where there is no scale | Glaze worn by past acid washing, not buildup | Blasting removes new scale but will not bring gloss back. We say this at the patch test, before you spend money. |
| Rust bubbling under paint on a truck fender or trailer rail | Surface rust, metal still solid underneath | Blast to bare metal, prime inside the inhibitor window. A repair, and a routine one. |
| Rust holes a screwdriver pushes through | Rust-through. The metal is gone, not dirty | Replacement panels or a welder. Blasting a hole just gives you a cleaner hole. |
| Paint peeling in sheets off a 1960s block wall or old brick | Failed repaint layers on masonry | Wet blast at tuned pressure, patch test first on pre-1980 brick. Repaint or seal after. |
| Brick faces flaking off or mortar joints turning to sand | Masonry itself failing, not the coating | A mason first. Blasting a crumbling wall speeds up the crumbling. |
Jobs we say no to
Wet abrasive blasting is the wrong tool for a real share of the calls we get, and saying so up front is cheaper for everyone.
- Stripping painted siding or trim on a pre-1978 home.Paint that old can carry lead, and renovation work that disturbs it falls under the EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, which requires a certified firm and specific containment. That is abatement work, not blasting work. Hire an RRP-certified contractor for it.
- Rusted-through metal. If the frame rail or fender is perforated, you need a welder and replacement steel. We will blast the solid sections so the welder can see what is left, but blasting does not put metal back.
- One small part. A single wheel, bracket, or vintage carburetor body is cabinet-blast work. A machine shop with a blast cabinet will do it for less than any mobile mobilization, and we will tell you that on the phone.
- Structurally failing masonry. Spalling brick and powdering mortar need a mason before they need cleaning. Blasting a failing wall makes it fail faster.
Run the five checks on us
Call (520) 510-0686 and ask all five, or send the quote form with what you are looking at. The insurance certificate, the media answer, and the written number come back the same day, and the prices are already public on the cost page.