Sandblasting my driftwood tables

Every piece of driftwood furniture I’ve created over the past 35 years has had to go through the sandblasting process. From that point, I would then sun bleach it, lacquer it or even leave it in that raw reddish, brown, blond tones. Until very recently it was a task that I did myself with my old & sometimes unreliable gas powered air compressor. It was a very slow, tedious & usually hot job that I never looked forward to, but was always pleased with the results.A month ago I had a number of table pieces that were ready to be sandblasted & several that were impending orders that had a deadline. But that Saturday I selected to do the deed was one of those days that my compressor decided to not cooperate no matter what I did to fix it. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it forced me to find an outside source that would do my blasting for me. I took them a few pieces just to see the results of their work & was very pleased with how they turned out & how little time it took for them to do it (minutes as opposed to hours).  Needless to say, I was not totally exhausted from doing it myself & could spend more time & energy on completing the tables.They’re able to sandblast in a large enclosed building with a much larger capacity sand pot, thus not needing to stop to fill up with sand as I was constantly doing & with a higher volume of air pressure which made for a shorter completion time.

                                 A few pieces that I had blasted this weekBelow is an interesting  dining table that I’m working on for Vera, a very pleasant customer from New Jersey. The next step will be exposing it to the weather for the next several months until it acquires that sun bleached finish that she requested.Another small but important thing that sandblasting accomplishes is enabling all the necessary cut ends to look weathered (like the top of an old fence post) rather than having the look of being fresh cut.