Our crew works all over Vandalia

Salt and fertilizer rust equipment around Vandalia

Vandalia sits in farm country, and the interstate runs right past town. That puts a lot of steel on wheels around the city, from grain trucks to the implements a tractor pulls. Every winter the road crews put salt down on the highways, and every truck that runs them comes home coated in salty slush. Salt holds water against the metal. Rust starts in the seams and under the old paint, where nobody sees it until the paint starts lifting.

Fertilizer does the same kind of damage on the farm side. A spreader that sits with residue caked on it starts to rust wherever the paint is chipped or thin. Spraying new paint over that rust does not fix it. The rust keeps growing under the fresh coat, and after a season or so the new paint flakes off in patches. On heavy equipment that means paying for the same job again.

So the work starts with abrasive blasting. We take the steel down to clean bare metal. That removes the rust and the old paint at the same time. Primer goes on before the bare steel has a chance to rust again, and the topcoat follows. Trucks and smaller pieces can come to our temperature controlled paint shop in Fillmore. Inside, the paint cures at a steady temperature no matter what the Vandalia weather is doing.

• Blasting down to bare metal before any paint goes on
• Truck and trailer painting in our temperature controlled shop
• Field painting for steel that cannot be hauled
• Power washing houses and sheds before exterior paint
• Concrete floor coating for shops and garages

We coat tanks on site around Vandalia

A big tank cannot be loaded on a trailer and brought to a paint shop, so that work happens in the field. Fayette County has oil wells, and the oil goes into steel storage tanks on site. Farms and businesses around Vandalia keep fuel and water in steel tanks as well. All of them rust on the outside, and the ones holding water or product can rust on the inside too.

The inside of a tank is a different job from the outside. A lining sits against whatever the tank holds, all day, with no chance to dry out. We blast the inside down to clean steel first, because a lining will not hold on rust or dirt. The lining goes on with plural component spray equipment, which mixes the coating at the gun so it cures hard. Some jobs call for water jetting instead, which strips old coating with high pressure water rather than sand.

Field work in Vandalia depends on the weather. Paint and linings need dry steel to stick, and summers here are hot and humid, with heavy dew on still mornings near the river. Spray over a damp surface and the coating can blister or peel later. So we check the steel and the air before we start, and we wait out a wet morning instead of spraying through it. A short delay costs far less than stripping a failed coating off a tank.

Vandalia houses and shops need paint too

Vandalia is an old town. It was the Illinois state capital before Springfield, and the old statehouse still stands downtown. The streets around it have older wood frame houses, and many of them carry layer on layer of paint from years of repainting. Newer homes sit farther out toward the edges of town. Besides the industrial work, our crew paints houses inside and out, and on an older house the prep work decides how long the paint lasts.

In a Vandalia winter the temperature swings above and below freezing again and again. Water works into cracks in old paint and freezes there, which pushes the paint away from the siding. Painting over that loose layer just traps the problem. We power wash the house first so we can see what is sound, then scrape off what is loose before any primer goes on. Where water has already soaked into the wood or drywall, water damage repair comes before the paint does.

Plenty of properties around Vandalia have a steel building on them, from a machine shed on a farm to a workshop behind a house. We blast and paint structural steel on site, and we paint the storage containers people use for extra space. Inside a shop, the concrete floor soaks up oil drips and the road salt that melts off a parked truck. A concrete floor coating seals the slab so spills sit on top and wipe up.

Getting a price in Vandalia

Call (217) 538-2025 or send your details with the form on this page. Tell us what needs work and where it is in or around Vandalia. The shop is open Monday through Friday. We look at the job, on site if it needs it, and you get a free free quote before any work starts.