Should You Be Using Steel Grit?

Steel grit grains are characterised by a predominantly angular shape and used as abrasive media. It’s created through the crushing ofsteel shot, and the sharp edges and broken sections only work to make it stronger. Despite this, you can find a variety of sizes and strengths for your needs.

Steel grit is an ideal abrasive media for etched surface requirements and deep descaling, and should always be moved with compressed air equipment.

Industrial applications

Steel grit is perfectly suited for aggressive cleaning applications, typical in industries such as the automotive industry. It’s often used to:

• Surface cleaning- Steel grit is used as a cleaning material for metal surfaces covered in dirt, rust, mill scale.
• Surface preparation- Creating roughness for a better paint and coating application.
• Stone cutting- Hard stones, such as granite need a hard media such as steel grit to cut it. In this circumstance, the grit is used in a number of large multi-blade frames to cut the granite into thin slices.
• Shot peening- The repeated striking of a metal surface by hard shot particles produces a deformation on the metal surface to improve its durability.

Industrial uses

Steel grit is used by a host of different industries that require surface cleaning, preparation or shot peening as part of their renovation, repair or construction processes. Some of the notable industrial sectors include:

• Automotive industries
• Construction industries
• Metallurgy
• The Petrochemical industry

Paint contractors, ship builders, container manufacturers, plant maintainers, pipeline manufacturers and steel fabricators all make extensive use of steel grit.

A low-maintenance option

Steel grit produces just a fraction of the 28kg of copper or platinum slag; lowering the maintenance requirements of your filtrations should you use it in blasting rooms with fitted extraction systems.

Environmental impact

Steel grit’s recyclability ranges between 2000 and 3000 cycles, generating far less waste than other expendable abrasives.

Contact the experts for more information

Over the past 30 years, Blastrite have enjoyed the dominant position in the market of abrasives and surface preparation by producing abrasive media from our own four mineral processing facilities.

If you want to know if your business could benefit from using steel grit, contact one of the experienced team members at Blastrite, and well take you through the best options for your requirements. Call +27 21 417 1700 or contact us now.