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Airblast installs a large grit blasting room for a major player in the motor trade industry.
Client
HGV Manufacturer and Dealership
Location
Northern England
Brief
Design, manufacture and install a comprehensive girt blasting room to process HGVs and trailers.
Background
In late 2023, a major player in the UK’s HGV motor trade industry reached out to Airblast to design, manufacture and install a comprehensive shot-blasting room to process HGVs. Our client is long-established in its sector, chalking up over five decades of successful trade and growth, specialising in sourcing, modifying, and servicing HGVs for the national and international markets.
After an initial consultation with our clients, we identified a blast room housed inside their workshop would be untenable as an indoor facility wouldn’t fit within the workshop layout. So, we settled on an external, standalone, weatherproof grit blasting room.
The Solution
Airblast offers three options for weatherproof facilities, ascending in size: containerised grit blasting rooms, skid-mounted grit blasting rooms, and cold-rolled framed girt blasting rooms.
Both containerised blast rooms and skit-mounted solutions are better suited for processing smaller products, so the cold-rolled framed blast room was the obvious choice. Cold Rolled Framed blasting booth is our largest weather-tight option. This blast booth is available up to seven meters to eves and has a 26-meter span. It can be deployed to almost any length. This booth style uses the frame to support both the external building and the insulated booth structure. Again, it can accommodate any of our abrasive recovery options, from the most comprehensive full recovery floor and sweep to rapid recovery elevators, screws and pneumatic Vaculifts.
Media recovery
Regarding media recovery inside the shot blasting room, Airblast studied the booth’s potential utilisation and varying product point loads across the booth floor. It was decided that a full recovery floor was unnecessary, but a pneumatic recovery device would keep up with their demand. This left screws or a rapid recovery elevator as a potential solution. When it comes to screws, Airblast is cautious about its deployment. A screw can be an excellent way of returning media to an elevator when the product is still in the booth. A cross screw, for instance, means that when grit has run out, media can be swept to the screw down both sides of the booth.
However, successful screw recovery mechanisms are expensive when it comes to groundwork and can be unreliable as they age. For this reason, Airblast prefers to ensure that the grit storage is sufficient to process the largest workpiece. If this can be done, all grit recovery can be undertaken after the fully blasted product has been removed from the shot blasting room. With the aid of a scraper on a fork truck, the media can be quickly pushed to a floor hopper and processed by elevators that rapidly recover via sieves and air wash chambers. Media back to a silo for reuse, thus avoiding all the uncertainty and deployment cost of screws, whilst maintaining optimal productivity. It is very common for Airblast to deploy a rapid recovery elevator with sufficient grit storage for a man to work 4 to 5 hours solid, meaning that he works all morning and recovers abrasive just before a lunch break and again as the last task of the day.
The Result
Comissioned in July, 2024, our client can now benefit from a highly considered and optimised surface treatment solution, streamlining their production while cutting outsourcing costs and mitigating production disruption.
