Iron Powder Abrasive

[Ptychodus04]

I have started prepping Green River fish for one of the quarries in Kemmerer and one of their requirements was that I switch to using iron powder for my abrasive. It's expensive but I wish I had done this years ago! It took a fair bit of cleaning to get the baking soda out of my dust collection system (you don't really want them mixing together). Iron powder is slightly harder than soda but is more rounded. It removes the matrix really quickly with less damage to the specimen. I can operate at significantly lower pressures as well. The softer bits of matrix come off easily at 8 psi.

 

Another aspect of the iron powder is that it is easily recoverable with a magnet in a bag. about 50% drops in the box. I pick it up with the magnet, sift it through a 100 micron sieve and dump it back into the abrasive hopper. My dust collector dumps into a bucket to collect the heavy/large particles on the way to the fines bag. This grabs about 90% of the abrasive that gets picked up by the suction. I have another magnet in the bucket that gathers most of the iron and every 4 or 5 hours of work time, I open the bucket and recover the abrasive. This gets sifted and goes back into service.

[Randyw]

Thanks for the suggestion!I still in the process of setting up my air abrasive system so this was perfect timing!

[ParkerPaleo]

Do you know how iron powder does against White River material?  

[Ptychodus04]

3 hours ago, Randyw said:

Thanks for the suggestion!I still in the process of setting up my air abrasive system so this was perfect timing!

Awesome. Get ready to drop some serious coin for the stuff!!

 

2 hours ago, ParkerPaleo said:

Do you know how iron powder does against White River material?  

I don’t but I would assume it will work well. I’ve been successful with soda on White River matrix. I’ll have to do a test run on a White River rhino skull I’ve been prepping off and on for 3 years in between contracts.

[ParkerPaleo]

5 hours ago, Ptychodus04 said:

Awesome. Get ready to drop some serious coin for the stuff!!

 

I don’t but I would assume it will work well. I’ve been successful with soda on White River matrix. I’ll have to do a test run on a White River rhino skull I’ve been prepping off and on for 3 years in between contracts.

 

I usually switch between soda and dolomite for White River, depends how hard the matrix is .  Let me know how it turns out.

[Ptychodus04]

7 hours ago, ParkerPaleo said:

 

I usually switch between soda and dolomite for White River, depends how hard the matrix is .  Let me know how it turns out.

Will do. It will be a while. I have a massive backlog of prep work. It’s a nice change from last year when there was close to no work all year!

[ParkerPaleo]

4 hours ago, Ptychodus04 said:

Will do. It will be a while. I have a massive backlog of prep work. It’s a nice change from last year when there was close to no work all year!

I do love to prep but that's why my side hustle is IT security