Surface technology company Wheelabrator has delivered its largest ever combined shot-blast machine to Liebherr Container Cranes Ltd in Killarney, Ireland (
www.wheelabratorgroup.com).
The new machine blast-cleans individual crane components up to 52m long, 3.5m wide, 4.2m high and weighing up to 52 tonnes. Designed as a combined pass-through monorail shot-blast system, is 36m long, 8m wide and 8m high; it is split in two along the axis of transport.
Inside are 24 Titan blast wheels arranged along two intersecting circles. Parts then pass through a touch-up area for manual air-blasting and abrasive removal. Lars Südfels, product manager at Wheelabrator in Metelen, Germany, says: “Despite the size of the machine, the devil was very much in the detail.
To allow the transport crane hook to pass through, there’s a slit in the roof along the full length of the machine; and due to their size, parts always stick out of the blast chamber. Rubber lamellas and brushes, as well as a clever door system, were necessary to close off the chamber as tightly as possible.”
Due to the size of the parts, blasting had previously been done manually by an operator in a cabin the size of a phone-box that moved along the longitudinal axis of the workpiece. The work was physically demanding, and it took several operators between eight and 12hr to manually air-blast individual crane components. The switch from manual air-blast to automated wheel-blast has cut processing times by 35-60%.