Excellence in Galvanizing
Scottish Galvanizers has unveiled a £350,000 facilities upgrade that will help to deliver continued high-quality service to customers spanning the construction, agricultural and engineering sectors.
The Glasgow-based company, which has the largest galvanizing bath in Scotland at 13.4m long, is part of Wedge Group Galvanizing. The plant has invested £260,000 on a new pre-treatment area at its Maclellan Street site, whilst it has also taken delivery of two new £45,000 cranes that will aid its overall production process.
The enhanced pre-treatment area includes new degreasing, acid pickling, rinse, and flux tanks with a holding capacity of 172,000 litres. This new equipment will play an essential part in the initial cleaning and preparation stages of the galvanizing process, where steel is dipped into molten zinc at temperatures of up to 450°C to provide a long-lasting protective coating against corrosion and rust.
Paul Cameron, General Manager of Scottish Galvanizers, said: “The enhanced pre-treatment area, incorporating the four new tanks, will be more heat and energy efficient than our previous equipment. To keep customer disruption to an absolute minimum, these improvements were carried out to a very tight schedule over Christmas and the New Year, and I’d like to pay tribute to our staff for ensuring the upgrade was completed on time.”
The firm, which employs a team of 47, has also purchased two new Demag cranes, each with a maximum lifting capacity of 5 tonnes. “The cranes will improve both speed and reliability across the entire production process. Combining these improvements with the revamped pre-treatment area will help to ensure we continue to deliver the highest quality and prompt galvanizing service to our customers, both here in Glasgow and further afield,” Paul Cameron explained.
The facilities upgrade comes at the end of another hugely successful 12 months for Scottish Galvanizers which saw the company work on a string of high-profile construction projects, including being involved in the building of a new 18,000 stadium for Rugby League giants St Helens, galvanizing the steel used to create two pontoons that helped bring a passenger ferry service back to Govan for the first time in 50 years, and processing 270 tonnes of structural steel used to build a new recycling plant on the outskirts of Falkirk.