If you ask a professional painter what the key to a good paint job is they will say that it depends on how well the surface that is being painted is prepared. The best way to prepare any surface is to remove any paint that is on what has to be painted. In industrial settings where large pieces of metal have to be painted this is not always an easy task. Instead of investing a lot of hours scraping off the paint by hand, a business can use a technique known as abrasive blasting. This is when some type of small abrasive substance such as sand is sprayed out of a hose under tremendous pressure. It is aimed at the surface that has the paint on it that needs to be removed. The sand will remove the paint without harming the metal that the paint is on. It only takes one person a short amount of time to remove all of the paint from the surface of the metal.