Blastrite is the market leader in the South African abrasives and surface preparation market with regards to:

  • granular abrasives,
  • and blasting and painting equipment

Our dominant position has been established and successfully defended over the past 30 years by becoming a technical partner to the industry, through ownership of resources and strategic distribution agreements with global technology leaders.

The company’s roots are in abrasive media production. Blastrite owns four minerals processing facilities around South Africa and, importantly, one of our facilities produces industrial garnet, enabling Blastrite to control distribution throughout South Africa. From this base, Blastrite has established sales and distribution infrastructure across South Africa and indeed, internationally.

In recent years, Blastrite has expanded from its abrasive media base and, through distribution agreements with class leading producers, begun to establish itself as a turn-key supplier to the blasting and coating contracting market.

These relationships include NLB (UHP waterjetting machines), Airblast (blasting equipment), Graco (coating & road marking equipment) and Monti-Werkzeuge GmbH (Bristle Blaster®).


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
  • Bristle Blaster®
  • Mechanical descaling equipment, such as needle descalers 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
  • Bristle Blaster® and 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

MethodResult

Blast cleaning

Ideal

Bristle Blaster®

Ideal for spot repairs, touch up jobs and weld seams

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