Choosing the best garnet grit to polish

Giving your surfaces a nice polish is best through using abrasive blasting and the appropriate blast media.

Garnet blasting—or, sandblasting—makes use of an air compressor to propel blast abrasive grains through a nozzle at high velocity onto your chosen project surface. This has a variety of applications, like being used to engrave stone for art, remove thick layers of paint or other substances, prepare a surface for another coating, or polish a surface.  Garnet is a very aggressive blast media. It’s best used for prepping coatings or removing coatings. It’s not the best choice for polishing jobs, especially at lower grit numbers. To provide a nice surface finish, garnet should have a very high grit number (above 150). When wanting to polish, it’s best to use glass beads as an abrasive media. The spherical shape rolls across your surfaces, giving them a nice polish but not penetrating the surface. There’s an even better blast media that’s suited for various blasting jobs. 

The Best Abrasive Grit for Polishing

There is another alternative—the EpiX and KinetiX abrasives from 10X Engineered Materials will polish the surface just as well as these other blast media. 

They are an engineered alloy of oxide materials that were created to resist breakage under mechanical stress. They can be reused multiple times and at varying PSI for a variety of different projects and results. They also work quicker than other abrasives because they are made up of polymorphous particles, meaning they can perform more than one step in a blasting job simultaneously. They’re safer than the alternatives because they create much less dust.

Currently, KinetiX and EpiX are available from abrasive distributors around the US. If you don’t see a distributor near you, contact 10X and we will work with you to get you what you need. EpiX abrasive, which is best for precision applications such as powder coating and medical applications, is also available to purchase directly from the 10X Engineered Materials website.