Jubilee Bank Holiday plant arrangements

The Jubilee Bank Holidays will soon be upon us, which means our plants will be closed.

If you have projects that need completing around this time, book the work in early so that we can complete it for you.

All Premier Galvanizing and Joseph Ash Galvanizing plants will be closed on Thursday 2 June and Friday 3 June 2022.

Enjoy your Bank Holidays too!

Intergalva takes place in Rome next month, and team members from Joseph Ash Galvanizing and Premier Galvanizing will be attending.

Intergalva is known as ‘the worldwide galvanizing industry’s meeting place’ and we’re looking forward to seeing some of our colleagues from global galvanizing plants, meeting some of our clients and who may attend, and learning about latest industry developments.

A key theme for this year’s Intergalva is energy supply and the future decarbonisation of galvanizing operations.

The event is hosted by the EGGA (European General Galvanizers Association).

Registration is still open if you’d like to attend.

Hot dip galvanized trailer chassis post-passivation

When using steel in construction, hot dip galvanizing is an essential part of the project to protect the longevity of the metal. You carefully design your steel to fit the overall build of the construction project. But sufficient care and attention are also required when you design your steel for galvanization. If you design right for galvanizing you’ll prevent any processing problems at the galvanizing plant and will also ensure you get the best steel coating possible.

Here’s some key design pointers to enable your steelwork to be processed safely whilst giving you the best quality coating.

When sending steel to a galvanizing plant, you will have several goals in mind:

Fast turnaround
Premium quality coating
Excellent service
Good value for money.

Ensuring steelwork is suitably designed for hot dip galvanizing helps achieve these goals and ensures the steel is safe to be galvanized. Poor design can result in poor coating quality, additional costs, low production rates, and failure to meet delivery dates. Poor design can also pose serious health and safety risks for the people carrying out the galvanizing.

What does good design look like?

The importance of venting and drainage

When steel is immersed in the galvanizing bath, add vent and drain holes to sealed hollow sections or cavities to ensure superheated air can escape all internal spaces and the molten zinc can flow freely over all surfaces, external and internal. Failure to adequately vent would result in trapped air causing an explosion and endangering galvanizing workers. It would also cause zinc build-up where the excess zinc cannot drain properly.

The sizing and location of vent holes are just as important as the provision of these holes. As a guide, make the venting holes as large as the steelwork can manage (but talk to your galvanizer for the best advice for your fabrications). The hole locations will be determined by how the steelwork is hung on the jigs at the galvanizing plant.

When adequately sized and correctly located, vent and drainage holes will:

Significantly reduce the risk of injury to galvanizers.
Allow faster immersion and withdrawal speeds which will help to minimise excessive coating build-up and reduce the risk of distortion by minimising temperature differentials.
Virtually eliminate the risk of damage to product, plant and equipment caused by the explosive vaporisation of entrapped moisture or air.
Improve the characteristics of the galvanized coating by restricting the effects of zinc solidification during drainage and reducing the mass of zinc required to achieve a good finish.

Size, weight, and shape matter

To ensure a good hot dip galvanizing finish, size, weight, and shape really do matter. A fabrication design should ideally incorporate easily handled components or fabrications which can be single dipped or subsequently assembled by bolting with galvanized fastenings. Double dipping is a possible alternative. Seek advice from your galvanizer before proceeding.

Suspension holes or lifting lugs may be needed if there are no suitable points for locating hooks or wires. Once again, lifting points should be positioned to maximise venting and drainage.

Minimising distortion

You will not want your steelwork to become distorted during the galvanizing process. To minimise distortion, fabrications should ideally be symmetrical, suitable for single dipping, and incorporate sections of as near equal thickness as possible at the joints. Components should also fit perfectly to avoid force or restraint during joining. Use continuously welded joints with balanced welding techniques to reduce uneven thermal stresses and the largest possible radii on all curved members.

Choose your galvanizer wisely

As well as following the rules of good design for pre-galvanized steel, take care when choosing your galvanizer.

Health and safety standards

Look for a plant with exemplary health and safety standards. One where the plant managers work hard to keep all colleagues and visitors safe with up-to-date equipment, sufficient PPE, good air quality, and clear-to-follow rigorous shop floor processes. And one where team members work safely on every job by thoroughly inspecting steel from the point it is delivered and at key intervals of the galvanizing process to ensure projects will not pose health and safety risks.

Training

Look for a galvanizer that not only trains team members on all aspects of safety in galvanizing, but also teaches clients and the wider industry. At Joseph Ash Galvanizing for example, we issue ‘Safe Design for Hot Dip Galvanizing’ posters to our clients as reference guides for steel preparation. We’ve also published a ‘Design for Galvanizing’ video (available on our website and YouTube), and we run ‘Design for Galvanizing’ seminars onsite for client teams.

Technical help

A final piece of advice is to always look for a galvanizing company happy to be on hand to provide technical advice on all aspects of pre-galvanized steel preparation.

Joseph Ash Galvanizing has a Technical Support Team who will answer any steel fabrication questions from clients. The team members are also happy to visit fabrication shops and advise on venting requirements to ensure fabrication issues can be resolved before the steel reaches the galvanizing plant.

We hope you’ve found these pointers helpful. For more information, please get in touch with a member of our team. There is also lots of helpful information freely provided by the Galvanizers Association.

As sustainability and good emission management are critical drivers for Joseph Ash Galvanizing, we always try to look for suppliers with like-minded responsible approaches to the environment.

Kall Kwik Birmingham is one of our suppliers, and we were proud to welcome them into our vendor family three years ago, as their green initiatives are admirable.

In 2019 Kall Kwik Birmingham joined Carbon Capture®, a unique market-leading, high impact, low-cost environmental initiative that creates new native woodland in the UK.

Through their involvement with Carbon Capture®, Kall Kwik enables all customers who order paper/print from them to capture the CO2 emissions from their purchases by planting native woodland through the Woodland Trust and the Woodland Carbon Scheme.

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What is Carbon Capture®?

A method of mitigating CO2 emissions and providing a reduced carbon solution for organisations
Creates native woodland in the UK and provides habitats for wildlife and green spaces for all to enjoy
A demonstration of an organisation’s values and responsible approach to the environment.

Woodland Carbon and The Woodland Trust

Woodland is the second-largest sink of CO2 after the oceans
The CO2 is captured by the planting of trees in new native woodland here in the UK through the Woodland Trust’s Government-backed Woodland Carbon Scheme
The scheme operates under the HM Government’s 2011 Woodland Carbon Code www.woodlandcarbon.co.uk
100% of the Carbon Capture charge goes directly to the Woodland Trust to plant native woodland in the UK
The Woodland Trust is the leading UK woodland conservation charity (Charity no. 294344 /SCO38885)
Woodland Trust aims to protect and develop natural woodland throughout the UK, thereby protecting our natural heritage
The Trust owns and manages over 1,000 free-to-visit woodland sites across the UK. The UK has just 13% woodland cover compared to the European average of 37%.

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Since joining Carbon Capture in 2019, Kall Kwik Birmingham has captured over 8500 tonnes of CO2, equating to about 210 sqm of new native woodland – roughly 35 trees!

Dene Sproson from Kall Kwik said:

“This is a fantastic achievement. Kall Kwik Birmingham and our clients should not underestimate this contribution. Whether it be 30 trees, three trees, or 3,000 trees we have helped to plant, our combined contribution to the overall programme is massive!

The critical thing we feel is that Kall Kwik Birmingham and our clients have committed to Carbon Capture®, helping to plant trees and further promote the initiative, which overall contributes to the government’s targets and commitments to NET-ZERO!”

Welcome to the Joseph Ash family Kall Kwik Birmingham. We look forward to a long relationship with you – and to planting more trees!

(Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash)

The Easter bank holidays will soon be upon us, which means our plants will be closed for the long weekend, giving our team members a well-deserved break.

If you have projects that need completing around this time, book the work in early so that we can complete it for you.

All Joseph Ash and Premier Galvanizing plants will be closed from Friday 15 April to Monday 18 April 2022.

We hope you have a great bank holiday weekend too!

We’re celebrating across the Joseph Ash Group, after landing another RoSPA Gold Award – the internationally-recognised award for demonstrating high health and safety standards.

We have received the RoSPA Gold Health and Safety Award for working hard to ensure our team members, customers, clients, and contractors get home safely to their families at the end of every working day.

Organisations receiving a RoSPA Award are recognised as being world-leaders in health and safety practice. Every year, nearly 2,000 entrants vie to achieve the highest possible accolade in what is the UK’s longest-running H&S industry awards.

The RoSPA Awards scheme is the longest-running of its kind in the UK, and receives entries from organisations across the globe.

Julia Small, RoSPA’s Achievements Director, said: “This is a fantastic and well-deserved accomplishment. All our award entrants demonstrate their unwavering commitment and passion for keeping people safe at work. By receiving this recognition Joseph Ash Galvanizing joins like-minded businesses and organisations worldwide, who represent the very best in their approach to Health and Safety. I would like to add my personal thanks for all the work that it has taken to secure this well-deserved award – congratulations to all those involved, who champion and drive up Health and Safety standards every day. You are a fantastic example to others in your sector.”

For more information about the RoSPA Awards visit www.rospa.com/awards

This year sees the return of the RIDBA Industry Open Day (Thursday 21 April), and we’re not only proud to be one of the headline sponsors, but we’ll also be talking about galvanizing at the event.

Hosted by the Rural and Industrial Design and Building Association, the day will include talks from expert speakers on topics such as:

Design of livestock buildings for an environmentally ethical future – Jamie Robertson, RIDBA Livestock Consultant
Keeping your galvanizer safe – Michael Worth, Head of Technical & ESG, Joseph Ash Galvanizing
Technical updates including NSSS – Martin Heywood, RIDBA Technical Consultant
Managing mental health in the workplace – Adrian Brine of Citation

Guests will also have the opportunity to enjoy a nice lunch and catch-up with industry colleagues, suppliers and sponsors.

It will take place at the beautiful Abbey Hotel in Malvern, Worcestershire, and will conclude with a tour of the nearby Morgan Motors Factory.

If you’d like to attend, there’s still time to get a ticket! We’d love to see you there.

Last week, our Bilston plant had a visit from Pat McFadden, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South East and Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Lucy Foster-Bowen (Commercial Manager) and Robert Nelson (Divisional Manager) showed him around the Bilston plant. Pat was impressed the variety of steel we process at Joseph Ash, including – in this photo – vine pickets for vineyards across Europe.

Bilston is proud of the plant and the work carried out there, so it’s always great to welcome new visitors.

An end of year message from Steven Hopkins, MD, Joseph Ash Ltd

To all our dear customers,

Another challenging year approaches its end! I have come to the view that you, our fabricator customers, and ourselves are sharing the same boat. We all had a dose of uncertainty from the start of 2021, then struggled with labour, then suffered from wage pressure from the driver sector of the workforce, then started to see material supply issues followed by considerable cost increases in just about every bought-in material and chemical. And then, to cap it all, massive increases in energy costs! Oh yes, going full circle, we come back currently to severe pressure on manufacturing wages.

So, I guess we will all be grateful to get 2021 behind us but, hang on, here we go again with possibly another destructive round of Covid! I fear that many Brits have become a bit complacent about it and have begun to ignore the high daily infection numbers, whilst we feel (perhaps with too much confidence) reasonably secured by our double or triple jabs. So caution has gone out of much of our behaviours in public. Not so, though, at Joseph Ash Group – we have never relaxed our Covid defence rules and we have kept up the mask-wearing, distancing, cleaning and detailed investigation of the movements and contacts at work of anyone testing positive for the few days before doing so. Therefore I believe that any of your drivers visiting our sites will continue to be safe, but will, of course, be asked to carry on respecting our rules.

It is difficult to predict the year ahead. Some further restrictions seem highly likely, with maybe even a short lockdown, with lessons learned from 2020 and an acceptance that the economy must continue to function. I doubt if material supply will get any easier for a while yet, and the ongoing, now routine, self-isolation of employees will keep us all several per cent short in labour. On the plus side, demand appears to be holding up. There seems to be plenty of money to fund investment in steel capital goods and projects, with many still awaiting associated materials to allow completion.

So, I wish us all luck in this manufacturing partnership boat of ours, and pray that the seas will remain reasonably calm. But, most of all, I wish that together, our staff and yours will stay healthy and content, starting with a very Happy Christmas for all, followed by a successful, safe and prosperous New Year.

Take very, very good care,

Steven

Lucy Foster-Bowen from Joseph Ash Bilston explains why in a podcast hosted by MIDFIX.

For products and solutions supporting mechanical and electrical services, the finish of the supports matter. Galvanizing is important as it plays a primary role in the protection of steel supports. Lucy Foster-Bowen from Joseph Ash Galvanizing explains why when she was invited to take part in a podcast hosted by MIDFIX.

Lucy covers topics such as:

What is galvanizing?
The history of galvanizing?
The process of galvanizing steel
The life expectancy of a product with galvanized steel
Venting and drainage
A pre-galvanized finish
The environmental impacts of galvanizing
How galvanizing impacts M&E supports.

Watch the podcast here. It was a great session!

Thanks for inviting us MIDFIX!

(MIDFIX are experts in onsite and offsite supports for the mechanical and electrical industries, delivered through design, engineering, fabrication and industry training.)