Re: 1991 Conquest 1650 "Restoration"
+1 on the full face mask. I bought just a standard half mask, but if I were to do it again I would go with the full face.
Three reasons:
1 - Better eye protection. Regular safety glasses only protect from direct contact, but there is no seal around the glasses so dust (and there is alot of it) easily gets in behind. You can get a set of sealed goggles, which I ended up getting but there were issues with fogging.
2 - Fogging. Even with a good seal around the half mask, some air may exit around the nose piece when you exhale, this will fog up your glasses and becomes a pain in the @$$. A full face mask should eliminate this problem.
3 - Dust. You'll find that that whatever you're wearing for eye protection, it will need to be cleaned every 5 minutes while grinding. With safety glasses, you have to clean both sides of the lens because dust gets in behind. With a full face mask, the inside would be clean, the only the outside would need to be wiped.
With either a full or half mask, be sure to be clean shaven that day, especially where the face piece seals on your skin. Even one day's growth can severely impact the seal which is ultra important when inhaling. You can check the seal by putting the face mask on with the cartridges
removed, cover the cartridge ports with your hands to seal them up, then inhale. The mask should suck tight to your face without letting any air in.
When you do get to the point where you're grinding, if you have to do it in your garage, I would highly recommend you tarp in your boat with dropcloths or cheap vapour barrier. That dust is going to get on absolutely everything in your shop, and it's a pain to vacuum it all up. Here is a pic of what I ended up doing, even with this, there was still a little bit of dust that got out.
On the second day of grinding, I opened up all of the garage doors (we had a nice day out for once), to let a breeze flow through which really helped out with the dust that got out of the tarps. The other thing I did on the second day was brought my shopvac right in the boat with me and ran it the whole time I was grinding. I have a HEPA filter in the vac, and it really worked wonders with the level of dust, I kept the hose hear the area I was grinding and it sucked up a lot of the dust. I could see way better, didn't have to clean my glasses as often, and my particulate filters on my mask didn't need to be changed as often. I did however have to shut the vac down and pound out the filter every 10 minutes or so.
Here is a photo of what it looked like inside the "tent" right after my first day of grinding, I was not running the shop vac that day.
