Marine Surface Preparation

High Safety Risks for Blasters and Yard Crews

Blasting in a shipyard puts workers in high-risk conditions: long hours on scaffolding or lifts, heavy recoil from large nozzles, limited visibility, confined spaces, and constant exposure to noise and debris. These risks increase the chance of falls, injuries, equipment strikes, and fatigue-driven mistakes.

For shipyards and contractors, safety incidents immediately halt production, trigger investigations, raise insurance costs, and damage contract performance ratings. For ship owners, safety delays extend drydock time and push critical coating and inspection windows further out.

The War on Dust for Shipyards

Dry abrasive blasting generates large volumes of dust and coating particles that spread across the dock, equipment, adjacent vessels, and work zones. Poor containment reduces visibility, slows blasting speed, and creates additional respiratory hazards for crews. Dust also reaches fresh steel surfaces, leading to contamination, rework, and coating failures.

For shipyards, uncontrolled dust drives up cleanup costs, increases environmental compliance risk, and can shut down operations if limits are exceeded. For ship owners, dust-related defects translate into more rework, higher coating costs, and reduced long-term protection.

Low Blasting Production Rates

Manual blasting performance swings wildly from shift to shift due to moisture in the air supply, pressure loss, operator fatigue, and inconsistent nozzle techniques.

Shipyards cannot plan coating or inspection sequences accurately, and vessel owners face avoidable delays and extended drydock time. These variations increase labor hours, inflate costs, and reduce yard throughput.

Extended Vessel Turnaround Times

Slow or inconsistent blasting causes cascading delays across the drydock workflow. Coating teams wait, inspections slip, and vessels occupy dock space far longer than planned.

Every extra day impacts shipyard capacity and increases off-hire costs for the vessel owner. Inefficient surface prep directly affects annual yard throughput and revenue.

Shortage of Skilled Blasters and Painters

Shipyards rely heavily on a limited pool of experienced blasters. With skilled labor becoming harder to find, crews run longer hours at height, face more safety exposure, and deliver inconsistent results across large hull surfaces.

Contractors struggle to meet deadlines, and ship owners absorb the cost when surface prep drags behind schedule.

Shrunken Margins for Contractors and Shipyards

Rising labor hours, costly rework, abrasive waste, and inefficient equipment time cut directly into job profitability. Fixed-price contracts become risky when blasting output cannot be predicted.

Shipyards complete fewer vessels per season, and owners pay more for each job. Surface preparation inefficiency reduces margins across the entire marine maintenance chain.

Inconsistent Surface Profile and More Rework

Manual blasting often results in uneven profile, improper cleanliness, and coverage gaps. When the profile does not meet spec, QA inspectors call for rework, forcing contractors to reblast areas and delaying coating application.

This drives up abrasive usage, labor costs, and material waste while increasing the long-term risk of coating failure for the asset owner.

High Cleanup and Waste Disposal Costs

Abrasive blasting in a drydock produces large volumes of spent media, coating chips, rust, and debris that must be contained, collected, and properly disposed of. When blasting is slow or inconsistent, abrasive use climbs and waste piles increase.

Shipyards spend more on cleanup crews, vacuum trucks, and hazardous waste handling. Overspray and uncontrolled media also trigger environmental compliance concerns, adding cost and risk for both contractors and vessel owners.

VertiDrive Robotic Blasting Robots

We manufacture the highest quality robotic blasting platforms. Our platforms deliver consistent nozzle distance, speed, and overlap, dramatically increasing daily production while removing most blasting work at height.

Achieve up to 5× manual blaster output on up to 90% of large hull surfaces, decks, and box-shaped cargo holds with operators kept safely on the ground.

High-performance BlastOne blasting equipment for marine surface preparation

BlastOne MegaBlaster™ bulk abrasive systems and AirPrep™ air drying units.

MegaBlasters support long, uninterrupted blasting cycles and multiple blast outlets, reducing downtime caused by refilling.

AirPrep™ systems remove moisture from compressed air, preventing abrasive clogs and pressure loss in humid dockside environments. Together, these systems deliver stable pressure, continuous production, and predictable output across large ship hulls and steel structures.

Up to 3000 bar at 45 L/min

We deliver ultra-high-pressure waterjetting systems up to 3000 bar at 45 L/min for marine surface preparation. Available in open or fully enclosed configurations with integrated vacuum recovery, these systems allow shipyards to remove heavy coatings while capturing water and debris, reducing cleanup time and improving environmental control inside the drydock.

Proven shipyard surface preparation expertise

We support shipyards and contractors with hands-on expertise covering hose sizing and layouts, air volume and pressure requirements, abrasive selection, and compliance with marine blasting standards.

We help build ROI-based business cases, ensuring blasting methods and configurations are technically sound, cost-effective, and aligned with project schedules and coating specifications for ship hulls and other large steel structures.

Training and onsite support that maximize performance

Even the best blasting equipment and robotic setups only perform as well as the people operating them. We provide hands-on training and onsite support that turn client operators into true super users.

A properly trained VertiDrive operator can achieve up to 30% higher production compared to operators with none or basic training on optimized robotic blasting systems, ensuring safer operation, higher output, and consistent results in shipyard environments.