We keep Hillsboro steel from rusting

Hillsboro weather is hard on bare steel

Hillsboro gets a full Illinois year. Summers run hot and humid, and winters swing above and below freezing again and again. Each thaw leaves water in seams and bolt holes, and each freeze pushes on whatever paint sits over them. A grain truck or a loader parked outside sits through all of it. Paint that went on thin, or over rust, starts to lift at the edges. Then rust spreads underneath, out of sight, until the paint comes off in a sheet.

Winter roads add salt. Trucks and trailers that run the highways in and out of Hillsboro pick up brine on every trip. It packs into frame rails and under the bed, where a pressure washer only gets part of it. If new paint goes over that, it seals the salt against the metal and the rust keeps going. So we sandblast a truck or trailer down to clean steel before a single coat goes on.

A truck or a piece of equipment can come to our temperature controlled paint shop in Fillmore, just down the road from Hillsboro. Inside, the coating goes on and cures at the temperature it needs, in January or in July. Some jobs are too big to haul, like a tank or a steel frame that is bolted down. Those get done in the field, on your site in Hillsboro. Either way, the steel is blasted or washed clean before primer touches it.

• Sandblasting down to clean, bare steel
• Truck and equipment painting in our Fillmore shop
• Tank coatings and linings applied on site
• Concrete floor coatings for shops and garages
• Interior and exterior painting for Hillsboro homes

Old paint on Hillsboro steel comes off first

As the county seat, Hillsboro has a lot of buildings around the courthouse that went up a long time ago. Older brick buildings like the ones downtown often have steel stairs and railings that have been painted over many times. Each new coat went on top of the last one. When the bottom layer lets go, every layer above it comes off too, which is why old paint peels in thick flakes.

Painting over that just adds one more layer that will fail with the rest. The fix is to take it all off. Abrasive blasting strips the old coats and the rust under them. It leaves the steel clean and a little rough, so new primer can grip it. That prep is the same whether the piece is a railing from downtown or a steel beam from a machine shed outside town.

Outside town it is farm ground, and the equipment there gets used hard. Sprayers and grain trailers sit out in the weather between seasons, and fertilizer corrodes bare metal fast. Plenty of it has been touched up with a spray can more than once, over rust that was never cleaned off. Those pieces get blasted to bare metal, then primed and sprayed with fresh coats.

Hillsboro tanks need linings that last

Farms and industrial sites around Hillsboro keep water and fuel in steel tanks. Weather works on the outside of a tank, where you can at least see the rust. The inside of a water tank sits wet all the time, and that damage stays hidden. Once water reaches bare steel, it pits the wall from the inside. Nobody knows until a leak shows up or the water comes out rusty.

A tank lining is the coating on the inside wall that keeps water off the steel. It only works if it bonds to clean metal with no gaps. So we sandblast the inside of the tank first. Then the lining goes on, often with plural component spray equipment, which mixes the coating from separate parts right at the gun. Water treatment tanks, which never get a dry day, get the same prep.

Tank and industrial jobs can come with written paint instructions and a record of every step. Each coat has to go on the way the instructions say, and the paperwork has to show it. Robb Spear left a Google review about a job like that. He had "a large job painting a piece of equipment with a complex paint and documentation process". He wrote that we "absolutely knocked it out of the park!!"

Getting a price in Hillsboro

Call us at (217) 538-2025 on a weekday between eight in the morning and five in the afternoon. You can also send the details through the form on this page. Tell us what needs work and whether it can come to our Fillmore shop or has to be done where it sits in Hillsboro. The estimate is free, and you get the price in writing before any blasting or painting starts.