Blast media, welding rods, grinder disks — these aren’t overhead. They’re task-specific costs with a calculable per-hour rate. Here’s how to price them correctly.

You just closed a sandblasting job.

Labor was clean. Crew hit the hours. Overhead was covered.

But the margin came in 4 points short of where you bid it. You’ve been through the numbers twice. Nothing obvious is wrong.

Here’s what happened. The blast media you consumed over 80 hours of blasting — around $110 per blasting hour in garnet costs based on what your operation actually spent — was sitting in your overhead pool. Not charged to sandblasting. Charged to everything. Every hour of every task on every job, carrying a slice of blast media cost that most of those tasks never consumed.

So your sandblasting rate looked cheaper than it was. You bid it accordingly. And the job absorbed the gap.

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