In a growing company as the business expands the challenge for management is to get as much as they can out of their floor space to avoid the cost of a facility expansion and eating into the revenue of the new business.
For Armoloy of Illinois, Inc., a coatings company in DeKalb, IL dealing with this kind of growth has been a fact of life throughout the 38 years of being in business. From the outside of the building the many additions that have taken place are obvious, but they could only add on so much. The expansion pressure inside the existing facility recently led them to erect another building.
To save those expansion costs they want to get the most out of their floor space. Case in point is a 12′ x 14′ blasting room they set up within a slightly larger room in their older facility. By changing their swing door to a Goff’s Power-Roll powered roll-up door, they can make better use of the area around both sides of the doorway, plus get some added benefits that relate to their operation.
In this room Armoloy does the wet blasting pre-cleaning that takes place before the coating process. This hard coat plating process is not typical. Because of its uniqueness they work on some rather interesting products ranging from coating the tubes used on nuclear reactors to athletic shoes.
Along with these products they service high-end industries in plastic injection molding, precision bearings, OEM and food processing, for example coating the grilles for a manufacturer that works with McDonalds. According to Armoloy Plant Manager Patrick Bradford “we have about 1,100 customers and at any given time we’ll have 100 plus open orders.”
Bradford goes on to explain “We operate with difficult, specialized orders. This process and it’s technology are so unique and effective that we had to license it.”
Their process is a thin, dense, chromium that that has an extreme surface hardness of 78 Rc and is corrosion resistant. The coating is chip resistant, lowers maintenance costs for the product and reduces product replacement costs.
The very slippery coating gives easy release in plastic molds. The molds are often for plastic parts on office chairs and for computer components.
Bradford recounts that their three biggest pieces in putting together this room is the lighting, the exhaust system, and the door. The job of the door is to contain the materials used in the process to the room and allow easy accessibility.
He got quotations for different styles of doors, yet all had the same approach and all were rather expensive. He went on the internet and found Goff. “When I contacted them their response was like NOW.”
Goff sent out Pat Mooney, an expert in roll-up doors from Mooney Dock to assess the needs at Armoloy. “We were told,” says Bradford, “the Power-Roll door would come in four weeks. It came in two weeks at a third of the cost of everything else we quoted.”
The feature Bradford likes about the Power-Roll door is his crew can pull the side guides apart, clean it and put it back together. “My guys can bend the curtain, pop the rollers, clean it all out and put it back together again.”
Bradford’s approach for the room is to take the mentality of a car wash bay and a paint booth, and marry them to make a wet blasting booth to improve on the handling process. They had a machine they built that just had typical swinging barn type doors. “We now have a level of seal that we now want we could never achieve with the old set-up.”
The 10′ x 10′ Power-Roll door contains the overspray and the dust it blasts loose from the pre-cleaning process. An exhaust system evacuates the particles and moisture once the blast cleaning is completed.
The door has a window to enable a check-up of what’s going on in the room. In addition, electrical installation was easy. The control box is NEMA-4 rated because of the blasting. The 110 motor gives the door an operating speed of 36’/sec and is very reliable thanks to the lightweight of the door curtain.
According to Bradford the Power-Roll door is ideal for their operation. The side guide design takes up little space around the doorway. Caustics are used in this room and standard door panels and aluminum side guides could be eventually eaten away. The Power-Roll plastic side guides are resistant to forklift impact. “And,” says Bradford, “the door’s non-stick vinyl surface can eb easily cleaned and there is virtually nothing on the door to corrode.”
“If we should damage one of these guides changing it out would be nothing. It’s a pretty simple deal.”
The door panel is ruggedly made for heavy-duty operations such as Armoloy. Made of 18-oz Coated Vinyl, the panel meets NFPA 701 Standards for Flame Retardancy, while the 40-mil. Double Polished Window meet California Fire Marshal Standards. Goff’s Coated Vinyl is designed to stand up to the harshest of conditions.
Totally capable of closing off the room, the Power-Roll Roll-Up door has a double baffle under the valance to contain the coating within the room. EPDM seals on both sides of the door ensure a tight seal at the vertical edges. The pultrusion pockets are reinforced with additional 18-oz coated vinyl and double lock stitched for durability.
“When you have put a lot of thought into developing a process such as ours,” says Bradford, “it’s great to have a product like the Power-Roll door that covers our needs.”
Please send inquires to:
Tony Goff
Goff’s Enterprises, Inc.
1228 Hickory St.
Pewaukee, WI 53072
Telephone: (800) 234-0337
Fax: (262) 691-3255
Email: sales@goffscw.com
