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Palm Beach County · Florida
Westgate dry ice blasting
When we take a job in Westgate, the rig comes to the machine rather than the other way round.
How the work runs here
Everything arrives on the van: compressor, hose, operator and containment. It is also why nothing has to be crated up and driven across town, the work happens where the machine already sits in Westgate.
Nothing of the ice survives the blast. That removes the entire cleanup problem every other method creates, leaving only the deposit that came off the equipment.
What we clean
Where this method earns its keep in Westgate
Nearby
Also working across Palm Beach County
Questions from Westgate
Do you need anything set up before you arrive?
Just access and parking. There is no tap to find, no drain to use and nothing of yours to plug into.
Can you come outside business hours?
Often yes, a lot of industrial work happens overnight or during a planned outage. Give us the window and we will say straight away whether it is realistic.
What do most jobs look like?
A mix, vehicle work, shop equipment, marine and light industrial. Same rig, different constraint each time.
Does distance affect the price?
Distance can factor in. You will hear about it up front, not on the invoice.
How do we book it in?
Describe the job and send a photo or two. Giancarlo or Kenny will call you, not a scheduler.
Will you travel to Westgate?
Yes, Westgate is well within range, and the compressor comes on the truck with everything else.
The local conditions
The heat matters more than people expect: baked-on residue cures harder in a South Florida summer. That is why so much of the work is removing what has bonded to a surface without taking the surface with it.
Light industrial, automotive and marine make up most of what we are called out for. In every case the truck brings its own air and its own containment, so you are not adapting the site to suit the method.
With no slurry to contain and no media to recover, a confined Palm Beach County site stops being a problem.
What comes off
The deposits we see most
Most calls involve one of the following. The common factor is a bond between two things that should not be bonded.
- Resin and mold release
Release agent and resin build-up on tooling, where a solvent fix trades one residue for another.
- Paint and coatings
Taken off in a controlled way when what is underneath matters more than speed.
- Salt and corrosion product
A constant in South Florida. Removing it without stripping the protective finish is the whole trick.
- Ink and printing residue
Dried ink and coating build-up on rollers and press components, where the surface texture is the product.
- Food residue
Carbonized product, fat, starch and sugar build-up on processing equipment, cleaned without chemicals touching a food contact surface.
- Grease and oil
The greasy base coat that traps grit and dust. It releases early and takes the loose material with it.
- Carbon and soot
Baked carbon on a manifold, oven or weld fixture. Thermal shock is exactly the wrong thing for the bond holding it on, which is why this works.
How a job runs
What happens once you call
If you have not seen this done before, the process is worth reading once. Nothing below is hidden in a footnote.
- We look at access and containment
Hose run, compressor position, what needs masking, and where the contaminant is collected. For food and electrical jobs the containment plan takes longer to settle than the blasting does.
- We test a small area
An out-of-sight patch comes first so pressure and pellet size are proven before anything that shows. Soft alloys, older paint and bare metal each want different numbers.
- We blast, then clean up
The ice is gone on impact. What is on the floor afterward came off your machine, and clearing it is ours to do.
- You look before we pack up
If something needs another pass we do it then, on site, while the rig is still running. That is a better outcome for everyone than a callback.
- You describe the job
The machine, the deposit and the downtime you can afford. Those three things decide the whole job, and we would rather know all of them before quoting.
The comparison
Why not just pressure wash it
- Hand scraping
Labor-intensive and uneven, and whatever you scrape with eventually marks what you are scraping.
- Media blasting
Effective and indiscriminate. On soft metal or a finished surface it does damage you then have to fix.
- Pressure washing
Water gets into everything and has to come out again before the equipment runs. Around electrics it is off the table entirely.
- Solvent and degreaser
Chemistry works, but you inherit ventilation, waste handling and a film on the surface.
- Dry ice
The pellet is soft and the mechanism is temperature, not abrasion. It turns to gas on impact, so the only thing left to sweep up is what came off.
What happens in your space
Dry ice is carbon dioxide in solid form. It is non-toxic and leaves no residue, but it does displace oxygen in an enclosed space, so ventilation is part of the setup rather than an afterthought.
Expect noise. Everybody inside the working area wears hearing protection, us included.
The part will be cold when we finish. Sometimes that means a short wait before handling; sometimes it means a film of condensation as it warms back up.
Air comes from our own compressor. You do not need to provide power, water or a connection of any kind.
Tell us what needs cleaning.
Tell us what the machine is, where it is and what is on it. A photo or two speeds it up. One of the owners calls you back.