The new OMSG Tunnelblast Compact Shot Blasting Plant installed at Ilcar Srl, a company from Cherasco (Cuneo), for High Aesthetic Value and Long-Lasting Protection: a success story in the article published by IPCM, International Paint & Coating magazine.
Ipcm® has been reporting success stories of companies from around the world or ten years now. If we took stock of the strategies they have implemented, it would emerge that there is no perfect or ultimate recipe to guarantee the success of a business. A firm’s growth or its relaunch after a period of crisis often depend on the historical moment, the geographical location, the spirit of the people who manage it, and other more or less controllable factors, including the human ability to seize the opportunities that arise. Moreover, real success, that is, the kind of success that enables a company to continue to exist for several years, is often linked to the ability to wisely manage every achievement through targeted investments.
An example of this is the case of Ilcar Srl (Cherasco, Cuneo, Italy), which has specialised in the contracting coating of large-sized parts since 1988 and which, at a particular historical moment, managed to meet the emerging market needs by conveying the image of a firm offering a punctual and quality service (ref. Opening photo). “Ilcar was established almost thirty-two years ago as an industrial body painting company working for a nearby manufacturer of car carrier trailers,” explains founder Francesco Beccaris. “Five years later, this producer incurred some problems and it was taken over by the Rolfo group, still one of the most important ones in Italy for the car carrier trailer sector. We continued painting trucks for a few years, but we gradually transitioned to a general industrial coating service.”
“In 2000, we stopped applying liquid products and exclusively devoted to powder coating, in order to solve the quality and eco-friendliness issues that we were encountering. This involved a reorganisation of our company and the search for new customers in other industries where powder coating was required. Therefore, we invested in new plants and technologies, especially with the aim of addressing a sector in which we had identified a shortage of contracting powder coaters: large carpentry,” says Beccaris.
“We installed a coating system able to handle parts with a maximum size of 8 metres in length and 2.80 metres in height and with a hanging capacity of up to 2 tonnes. Back then, no one treated workpieces with this size in the province of Cuneo. This enabled us to immediately establish ourselves on this market and to be competitive thanks to the product savings guaranteed by the use of powders. We also offered a shot blasting service prior to coating, which was a surface preparation process that nobody else performed. This also contributed to our success in a well-defined market segment, in which no one offered the services we did,” explains Beccaris.
Now, Ilcar has 23 employees and works for different segments of the heavy carpentry industry, including the earthmoving field, which accounts for 40% of its production.
New production requirements and the will to guarantee ever greater quality and corrosion protection have led Ilcar to turn to OMSG – Officine Meccaniche San Giorgio SpA (Villa Cortese, Milan, Italy), for nearly sixty years specialising in the design and construction of shot blasting, sand blasting and shot peening systems, for an automatic turbine shot blasting plant.
Functionality and compactness: the new shot blasting system
“Ilcar treats medium-light and heavy carpentry parts with large dimensions, up to 8 metres in length, such as railings,” says Valentina Beccaris, who has been managing the company together with her father for twenty years. “We have always distinguished ourselves as capable of guaranteeing quality in terms of not only aesthetics but also, and above all, functionality and protection. We initially had a manual shot blasting plant, but we soon realised that it entailed higher costs and problems related to the repeatability of our surface preparation results. We therefore opted for a Carlo Banfi automatic roller conveyor shot blasting machine; however, it had some limitations in terms of pre-treatment with particularly large-sized and complex parts. That is why we decided to integrate it with a new automatic shot blasting system able to paint any type of workpiece, so as to definitively abandon our manual plant.”
“However, equipping ourselves with
a shot blasting machine with a length
of several metres would have been impossible due to space reasons,”
notes Francesco Beccaris. “We turned
to OMSG, which had acquired the
Carlo Banfi brand in 2017, to develop a compact solution that, at the same time, allowed us pre-treating large structures with consistent, high-quality results.”
The new Tunnelblast series tunnel
shot blasting plant (Fig. 1) features 16 automatic turbines that can be adjusted depending on production requirements and treated materials and a chamber where an operator performs blow-off, quality control, and, if needed, manual touch-up operations (Fig. 2). “No such plant had ever been built,” states Giorgio Pozzi, sales manager for Italy at OMSG. “In order to solve the firm’s space issues, we designed an alternative process
in which the workpieces go through
the blasting chamber twice: whereas a standard system is composed of loading, shot blasting, and unloading stations, loading and unloading occur on the same side in Ilcar’s one.”
“Although unconventional, this system fully met our needs. In a standard system, the parts would have to move more slowly to achieve our required surface preparation degree, whereas this double-passage system guarantees higher speed, thus making the process competitive – with the added value that it can pre-treat large structures even though it is a compact plant,” says Francesco Beccaris. “We are also very pleased in terms of yield: we have achieved greater result consistency and repeatability, as well as better paint adhesion. And, one year and a half after its installation, we can state that our productivity is also higher (Fig. 3).”
The coating systems
In addition to the mechanical pre-treatment operation performed by the OMSG plant, Ilcar can also carry out a chemical pre-treatment process designed by Silvi (Peregallo di Lesmo, Monza e Brianza, Italy) that occurs in three stages: phosphodegreasing, rinsing in mains water, and rinsing in demineralised water. The company owns two coating plants: a manual, static one built by Euroimpianti (Fig. 4) and an automatic one; the latter features a Futura Convogliatori Aerei two-rail conveyor (Fig. 5), a Wagner SuperCube quick-colour change booth (Fig. 6), five Reind reciprocators per side, and two manual pre and post-retouching stations (Fig. 7). “The two off-line pre-treatment plants allow being very flexible and activating the mechanical or chemical pre-treatment process based on the materials to be treated.
We usually opt for the chemical one for lighter alloys such as aluminium and for the mechanical one for heavier alloys such as iron and steel,” indicates Francesco Beccaris. “Our coating plants also guarantee a very versatile process flow, as we can distribute the workpieces between them depending on their size and shape: the largest parts, up to 2.20 metres in length, are treated in the manual system and all other components are handled by the automatic one.
Quality and long-term protection
“Coating contractors often depend on market fluctuations; therefore, it is very difficult to predict future production trends. There are both quieter periods and moments in which we completely saturate our production and logistics capacity,” states Valentina Beccaris. “Ilcar has always tried to stand out on the market – by meeting the sector’s new needs at first, and then by offering high-quality services guaranteeing not only excellent aesthetics but also high corrosion protection. As they recognise our efforts, many customers demand our services and rely on our experience to select the best coating cycle.” “When we decided to install a new shot blasting plant to make production leaner, we turned to OMSG because we have always esteemed them and we knew their products’ quality,” adds Francesco Beccaris. “Their system has enabled us to guarantee higher result repeatability and consistency, which also helps further increasing our finishes’ quality and durability.” “The future of coating is changing: customers no longer just ask for a good-looking, ‘fashionable’ finish, but they are increasingly focussing on long-term corrosion protection. Ilcar wants to meet this need by presenting itself as a producer of high-quality finishes in terms of not only aesthetics, but also functionality,” states Valentina Beccaris.
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