LOW PRESSURE OAK BEAM CLEANING
These beams have undergone abrasive blasting or sand blasting with very low pressure. This job was conducted in the North Bedfordshire area on a building with a timber frame construction. These beams had been covered with many types of paints, stains, coating and fillers, over the years.
The blast media of choice for this type of application, is a super fine grade crushed glass. This grade of media is ideal for removing old paint & wood-stain, allowing the naturally aged oak to shine through again, In most cases, these oak beams have a story to tell & that story should be preserved by the help of a skilful operator.
OUR WORK
At CJK Abrasive Blast Cleaning & Surface Preparation, we take great care in our customers work. As it’s all too easy to remove the aged character of these types of beams by over blasting, This can commonly be seen in some of the properties we have visited. If your observant & truly interested in your work, as we are at CJK, you will see all sorts of marks, characters or even symbols on some of these beams. To me, this is telling you a story of their history.
EQUIPMENT & METHOD
At CJK we design & build speciality equipment for these applications. One of the most important parts or any blast system is control, I’m my opinion this is probably the most important part. This is closely followed by the essential requirement for clean dry air, the blast media of Choice, will not flow correctly if it contains trace elements of water or condensation. Our blast systems consist of the following pieces of equipment:
- Good sized compressor capable of suppling a sufficient volume of good quality air.
- An after-cooler that has the ability to cool the air enough to convert the moisture in gas form, into a liquid.
- A coalescent filter to trap the water vapour produced in the compressed air after the cooling process.
- A regulator system to control the blast pot and output blasting pressure.
These are the main components of a high quality blasting system. When you have all of these items in place you gain full control. The correct approach is to have just enough pressure, with full control of the system. To be able to remove the dirt, paint or coatings without removing anything else.
OBJECTIVE & HISTORY
The true objective with this type of work, is to clean & preserve the history, as many of these beams have had former lives in one way or another, some in previous buildings & some being reused from vast ships in the past. On many occasions this can be seen by the waters marks on some of the beams we have blasted. These water marks don’t just come from the timbers getting wet once or twice in their lives, this comes from consistent exposure to water from rivers, seas or even oceans. On many ocasions you will find these oak beams full of wood worm holes & the interesting part is:
Wood-worms can’t eat through dry oak. So in a way, this proves they have been really wet at some point in time.
History proves to us in many ways, that Recycling is nothing new ! This has been going on with buildings and structures throughout our history for centuries
CJK ABRASIVE BLAST CLEANING & SURFACE PREPARATION
Conducts this type of specialist restoration cleaning work across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire & Hertfordshire. The shires are filled with history & consist of many types and ages of buildings and structures. It’s important to preserve all of this for the next generations.
CJK where quality comes first.
