ight I mention the title of this post (as pulled from "A Boy Named Sue") is infinitely preferable to the reverse - i.e. Guts in your grits. They just don't stir in very easily.

Today was day two of turning our sanctuary into the world's largest hourglass. There are piles of sand all around the edge, and everything is covered in a thick layer of brick dust. This was easily one of the more frustrating episodes in our little soap opera. The sand blaster kept getting clogged up. At first it was just at the hose-tip, which was bad enough as the sand pretty much locks the threads on the tip, making unscrewing it and cleaning it pretty difficult. We figured it was chunks of mortar sneaking into the mix when tried to recover used sand from the floor. We strained it, but somehow little bits of sand turned into bigger clumps that stuck together really well at the worst moment. After "fixing" that a few times, we started having plenty of airflow, but no sand. There was lots of sand in the pot, but none coming out. This wasn't nearly as simple to fix as a clogged tip.

We spent an hour and a half disassembling the gravity feed and air-inlet valve mechanism. It's not a complicated device, but I hadn't dealt with one before, and I really didn't want to learn on rental equipment.

After getting it apart, I figured out what hole did what. Three holes let air through, and one lets sand fall into the chamber with the air, right over the inlet for the hose. A disc with 4 holes is operated externally, and turns to allow more or less sand & air through. It's like a carburetor, except with sand instead of something more explosive. All the holes looked fine, except one of the air holes had a spongy mass of sand and what appeared to be oil crammed in it. Perhaps problems with the compressor forced some hydraulic fluid into the line? I know there isn't many other places for an oily substance to enter the system, and I know running the diesel improperly can do bad things. I'll expect Big Dog to weigh in on this for some theories.

Anyway, after cleaning out the gunk, and running the compressor through the disassembled valving sans sand (thinking this would blow out any remaining liquids) we re-assembled the mess and topped it off with fresh sand. It ran well enough to finish the upper part of the sanctuary. We were thrilled to be done, and dejected that we still had the whole lower sanctuary to do. Sally had to go prepare for her thesis defense, and I have to return all the junk to the rental place tomorrow at 8am, so we called it a day at 9 tonight.

Sandblasting has officially moved into first place as the messiest and most unpleasant job we've undertaken. With any luck this task will be be the last really messy thing we'll do - at least until we start finishing drywall.

I'm going to sleep now, breathing deeply of brick dust that's found its way to our bedroom. I can't imagine why more people don't do his sort of stuff with their weekends.