While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
Next to laser ablation, there's no more satisfying videos to watch on the ol' YouTube than dry ice cleaning. All that dirt and rust and grease just gone in a matter of a couple swipes, leaving behind untouched metal, plastic, rubber and paint. It looks like magic and seems almost too good to be true — especially when you hear it doesn't use any solvents or make an environmental mess — but it's indeed legit, with entire channels devoted to nothing but dry ice cleaning as part of a total vehicle detailing, and it's becoming more widely available to the collector car community all the time. But what is it, really, are there any downsides to it, and how does it compare to other media blasting methods we're more familiar with?
The best rundown on the method we've seen so far comes from Chicago Auto Pros, which interviewed three dry ice blasters about exactly how the method works and the finer points of cleaning and sometimes stripping cars with the method. For those of you thinking you can just pick up a dry ice blasting setup and start making money with it, they also go into the costs of setting up a dry ice blasting business (spoiler: It ain't cheap).
As far as equipment goes, there seems to be plenty of options, from massive industrial machines to ones that the average shop can employ for light use. No DIY-friendly setups seem to exist, largely due to the high pressures and costly dry ice pellets required, but the closest we've seen seems to be the units employed by Car Builders.
See more videos that compare dry ice blasting to abrasive blasting and steam cleaning.
