Thom Bell has been around the finishing industry for a long time and thought he had seen it all. He was wrong.
“I’ve been in this business over 40 years,” says Bell, vice president of Clemco distributor Precision Finishing Inc. (Quakertown, Pennsylvania, USA). “I’ve never seen anything like this. If six months ago you told me that we would start up a 54-by-20 ft [16.5 by 6.1 m] blast room with a 50-ft [15.2 m] belt conveyer and two bucket elevators—over the Internet—I would have told you that you are full of it.”
Earlier this summer, a Precision Finishing employee and three employees of MGS Inc. (Denver, Pennsylvania, USA), a trailer manufacturer that purchased the blast room from Precision Finishing, were at the MGS site. Via video chat, the on-site participants followed instructions from two Clemco employees to start up a new blast room. “Of course, we weren’t planning on a virtual startup,” says Adam Gildehause, the field service engineer at Clemco (Washington, Missouri, USA) who led the virtual startup. “But then COVID-19 hit.“
Gildehause and Nathan Bjornson, the company’s Northeast territory manager, remotely guided the on-site crew through the usual startup checklist, as well as extra steps for the blast room’s custom-engineered components. Among other items, they helped the crew determine that the dust collector’s reverse-pulse settings and pulse pressure were correctly calibrated. They also assisted the onsite crew make adjustments to the motors of the blast room’s two bucket elevators, air-wash abrasive cleaner, dust collector, and belt recovery system.
“Some belts needed tightening,” recalls Bjornson. “We helped the crew verify that the two blast machines were operating correctly, and walked through small, routine adjustments.”
“It took only about three hours,” adds Craig Martin, sales engineer at Precision Finishing. “And as soon as it is allowed, Clemco will be here for follow-up. In the meantime, we can communicate remotely.”
MGS is using the room to blast 48-ft (14.6 m) and longer trailer frames to a near-white-metal finish for several military contracts. “In the past we may have sent the blasting out to subcontractors,” says Matt Sweigart, vice president of operations at MGS. “But we can’t risk flash rust forming before washing down, priming, and then painting the trailers. Now, with the blast room, we have in-house control over the entire process.”
Source: Clemco Industries, www.clemcoindustries.com.