What We Do

Blastrite is a family-owned and -managed manufacturer and distributor of granular abrasives commodities. To this end, Blastrite owns four mineral processing facilities in South Africa as well as sales and distribution infrastructures in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg that supply shipping, construction, mining and other industries.

Beyond abrasives materials, Blastrite enjoys agency and distribution agreements with class leading

sandblasting

and painting equipment producers, including:

  • NLB, suppliers of high pressure (HP) and ultra high pressure (UHP) waterjetting equipment
  • Graco, specialists in painting equipment
  • Airblast and PAN Abrasive sandblasting equipment
  • Monti MBX, suppliers of mechanical preparation tools
  • OMI, compressed air aftercoolers
  • RPB, HSE equipment
  • and many other producers.

New products on the block!

With Elcometer and ST Prep equipment freshly on board, Blastrite is excited to announce new equipment and stock is available to our clients. Contact your nearest office for details.
 

Equipment

Blastrite stocks a large range of equipment from leading manufacturers across the globe. These include:

  • Abrasive blasting equipment
  • Abrasive blasting consumables, including LED blasting lights
  • Mechanical descaling equipment, such as needle descalers, bristle blasters and chain descalers
  • Inspection equipment
  • Compressed air aftercoolers
  • Airless painting equipment
  • Airspray pressurised pots and guns
  • Blast cabinets
  • Suction guns
  • Pneumatic vacuum drums
  • Fine finish spray guns
  • Personal protection equipment (PPE) for grit blasting and painting
  • Ventilation equipment

Surface preparation

The success or failure of a paint system rides on the standard of the surface's preparation. The best paint or coating can fail on a poorly prepared surface. And the simplest and cheapest paint can perform better than expected on a well-prepared surface.


What should a good surface preparation provide?

  • A clean substrate, free from impurities
  • Sufficient surface roughness to give a good anchor pattern for the coating
  • A surface that can be easily wetted by the selected paint
  • A substrate without sharp edges so that a uniform film thickness can be obtained all over

Blastrite has a comprehensive offering of painting preparation media and equipment. Review our abrasives and painting preparation products under the products list, or download the latest product brochures from our Downloads section.


Pre-treatment in surface prep

Studies show that pre-treatment before coating application is the single most decisive factor impacting lifetime (and thus cost-effectiveness). Poorly pre-treated surfaces with contamination and insufficient blast cleaning result in reduced coating adhesion, blister formation and ultimately corrosion under the coating.


The following pre-treatments are available:

  • degreasing and cleaning
  • blast cleaning and shop-priming
  • power tool cleaning
  • high pressure waterjetting
  • steelwork (pre-blasting preparation) that affects surface quality, including weld quality, grinding or rounding off sharp edges

Surface preparation methods

Method Result

Blast cleaning

Ideal

Mechanical wire brushing

Risk of polishing

Mechanical disc-sanding

Some risk of polishing

Needle chipping

Some risk of indentations

Mechanical rust chipping

Not good

Mechanical scraping (air powered)

Good combined with other methods

Hand brushing

Poor

Hand scraping

Only to be used in combination with other methods

Water jetting including ultra high pressure water jetting

Very good but with risk of flash rusting

Electrolytic descaling

Salt water tanks only. For removal of rust scale only, not paint