Why we brought blasting and coating in-house – and what it means for your order

Blasting and coating used to be a stage we handed over to external subcontractors. Now it happens under our own roof, to our own timescales, and to our own standards. Here’s why that matters, and what it means for anyone placing an order with us.

Bringing it in-house

Blasting and coating is a critical part of the ordering process for many of our customers. If the surface preparation is wrong, the coating won't adhere properly. If the coating is wrong, you've got a valve that won't stand up to the environment it's heading into.

For years, like most of the industry, we relied on subcontractors for blasting and coating. It worked, but it often came with variables that sat outside our control. Their schedule wasn't always our schedule. Their quality checks weren't always as high as ours. And when their workload spiked, our jobs queued up behind everyone else's.

So we did something about it. We invested in our own state-of-the-art blasting and coating facility, staffed by our own people and run to our own specification. 

Our facilities

Our blasting and coating is a housed unit that recycles its own blast media, with four dry-back spray booths, each with its own extraction, and it covers everything from ¼" up to 48".

We shot blast to ISO 8501-1 grade 2½ using aluminium oxide, to a profile finish of between 40 and 100 microns, and critical areas – ends, stems, threads – are protected with blasting tape before that process starts. Coating is applied as a wet coat system, from primer only through to a full multi-coat finish, built to whatever the customer has specified.

What it means for your order

For you, the practical difference comes down to two things: quality and delivery.

• On quality we can hold every valve to a consistent standard from start to finish, because the people doing the blasting and coating are the same people who understand the specification the valve needs to meet. Surface profile, humidity, temperature and dew point are monitored throughout, and coating thickness is verified with a calibrated DFT gauge after every coat. Supplementary tests are available where a spec calls for them, and we’re happy to accommodate third-party witnessing too.
• On delivery we can give you dates we’re confident in, because we’re no longer dependent on an external blasting and coating supplier. If something needs to be prioritised, we can prioritise it – something that simply wasn't possible when this was done elsewhere.

The RPV one-stop-shop

This is very much in keeping with how we think about the business as a whole. We’d rather bring capability in-house and give you one point of contact, one point of accountability and one team that understands your order from the moment it’s placed to the moment it leaves us.