Repair or replace: what blasting tells you

Blasting is diagnostic as much as preparatory. Scale, filler and old coating hide a lot, and removing them shows you what you actually own.

What gets revealed

• Perforation where scale was holding the shape.
• Section loss — steel thinned to the point it no longer carries what it used to.
• Previous repairs, often badly done and coated over.
• Weld condition, including cracking that was invisible under paint.

How to plan for it

Assume there will be some. On any asset over a decade old, budget a contingency for repair rather than treating discovery as a project overrun. The alternative — not knowing — is worse.

Blasting does not create the problem. It stops you paying to coat one.

The decision framework

Localised perforation in non-structural sheet is usually a straightforward repair. Widespread section loss in load-carrying members is a replacement conversation. Anything structural should be assessed by someone qualified to do it, not by us.

It is a decision worth making before a unit leaves a yard in Redcliff or Brier Park Industrial for a fabricator, because blasting is what tells you whether you are paying to repair sound steel or paying to patch something already finished.