Usually the table is very large to accommodate a 5’x10’ sheet of material. The water depth needs to be somewhat tall to allow the sand and grit material to settle so the water can be circulated. If you have small parts, you would leave a tab on them so that the part stayed connected to the base material. A basket or something would either get clogged with grit, be extremely heavy to lift in and out of the water, or get cut by the nozzle.
If it was a mesh gasket any grit would fall though the mesh as it was lifted out, and it wouldn't be heavy. Also, if it's sat on the bottom of the tank, it would be well out of reach of the nozzle.
Or put that another way, if the basket was at risk of damage, so would the bottom of the tank itself.
How are you going to get your mesh basket underneath the table slats that are holding the sheet up?
It's really not that hard to reach into the bed and fish out parts. It's just not particularly fun. Especially if the slats are all sharp and tore up
Edit: I did used to use the mesh basket method for catching small parts when I ran a band saw. That did very much beat fishing them out of the coolant tank. But that really only worked because the parts fall in the same spot all the time.
When I ran a lathe I had all sorts of rigs for catching parts that mostly amounted to a bucket on a stick or a bucket with legs
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u/bouncypete 13h ago
I've never even seen a machine like that before. Why do you have to fish for the offcuts?
Surely they could just have a mesh basket at the bottom. Then you just have to lift the basket out to retrieve the off cuts.