The best time to blast farm equipment is when it is parked

Equipment refurbishment competes with using the equipment. That is the whole problem, and it is why so much iron in this country goes another year looking rough.

The window nobody books

From freeze-up to seeding, most of it is parked. That is four or five months where a stock trailer, an auger or a bale deck can be stripped, primed and painted without costing a single working day. It is the cheapest possible time to do it and it is the time we get the fewest calls.

By the time the weather turns and everyone remembers the trailer looks terrible, they need it in three weeks.

What rust actually costs

Surface rust is cosmetic right up until it is not. Once it works into a seam or under a floor, you are replacing steel rather than coating it. On a stock trailer the floor and the lower frame rails go first, and they go from the inside where nobody looks.

Blasting does not fix rot. It finds it. Better to find it in January with time to weld than in May with cattle to move.

Why we come to the yard

Most of this gear either does not roll well or is not worth a float bill. The rig carries its own compressor, pot, media and water, so we set up on your ground, work off it, and take the spent media with us.

What we take on most

• Livestock and stock trailers, inside and out.
• Hay and bale decks, goosenecks, highboys.
• Augers, conveyors and grain handling, including flighting and hoppers.
• Headers, cultivators, seeders, sprayer booms and implement frames.
• Bin sheeting and structural legs.

Line up the paint first

Bare steel starts flash-rusting quickly, even in cold. We carry rust inhibitor in the water, but that buys days, not months. Know who is painting it before we strip it.

Worth knowing across Cypress County, Bow Island and Foremost, where the machine is parked from harvest to seeding and that gap is the only genuine window to get work done on it.