Cleaning, polishing and smoothing the edges of materials that need to be prepared for further manufacturing before they can be shipped to the store is a dirty job. Grit blasters, which are also known as media blasting equipment or sandblast equipment, use water and various forms of grit to strip a material of all excess that is attached to it. To make the material clean, polished and smooth the grit blaster has to get the material or object dirty.

The manufacturing and refurbishing of many products and parts benefit from the use of a grit blaster. For example, when wooden furniture is in the midst of fabrication, in between when it has been carved and glued but before it is painted or stained, a trip to the grit blaster is a good idea. With blasting media to smooth the surface of the wood while removing any leftover dirt or dust, this process of grit blasting is vital to the way the finished piece of furniture will look as well as how well the stain or paint will take to the surface. A clean material will be able to retain the treatments applied to it much better then a material that is still dirty. This goes for metallic, ceramic and plastic materials as well.

Grit is a fairly general term for any sort of blasting media that is loaded into a blaster and mixed with the water to help dislodge excess material when it is shot at the product being cleaned. There is a vast variety of blasting materials available these days, from soft and gentle powders such as baking soda to harsh and gritty materials such as sand or tiny beads of glass or metal. Another aspect of grit blasters that can be altered is their size and the speed at which they shoot their grit and water mixture at a material.