How Dry Ice Blasting is Saving Our Aerospace Customers Thousands of Pounds.

Its been an extremely busy period for Optimum Dry Ice Blasting over the last 4 months, culminating in signing one of our largest contracts to date.

The contract is an amalgamation of 4 different sites that we service with dry ice blasting for the same company within the aerospace industry. It has been decided that these separate service agreements would be converted into one large contract, also incorporating 2 other sites. Congratulations again goes to my hard-working teams and back room staff.

Aerospace has long been an area where we feel dry ice blasting hasn’t been utilised to its full potential within the UK. It has taken an almighty effort to get our process ‘over the line’ (see our previous blog here) and, we are glad to say, with our robust in-house training and audit programmes we now have the capability to offer the service that the aerospace industry has been crying out for. Working alongside our client, we have created a dry ice blasting system to ensure human error is no longer a factor, utilising our in-house developed and unique DIB-Digital Date Stamping technology and software, every aspect of the service is recorded, monitored and performance checked/audited. Without the system, we wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the machinery/parts we are working on!

It has now been estimated that since we started the works we have saved a massive:

• 200,000 gallons of (contaminated) water
• 7000 cloths
• 2300 gallons of chemical
• 750 hours of wasted manual labour costs
• 200 linear m of blue role
• 350kg  of contaminated plastic (destined for landfill)                                            
• £434k in lost production time

(*figures supplied above are from clients estimates)

We have entered into a 3 year contract, creating 6 new full time positions spread across 6 sites. Aerospace companies demand the type of traceability our system now offers and makes dry ice blasting the ‘go to’ procedure for cleaning delicate components.

This new financial year has already seen Optimum open up services with 7 new UK customers and, aligned with retaining every single one of our older customer base on new contracts/yearly schedules, it is easy to see why growth is estimated at 40% for the 17-18 year.

So, all in all, a busy, exciting start to the new financial year. Plenty in the pipeline and loads of new ventures to be getting on with.

Onwards and upwards.

By Ian Reynolds