Major automotive supplier more than triples maintenance intervals on blast wheels with TITAN Endurance™ wear parts from Wheelabrator
A leading automotive supplier has dramatically increased uptime and reduced overall maintenance costs on a shot blast machine at its facility in Spain – by switching to TITAN Endurance™ wear parts from Wheelabrator on all eight of the machine’s TITAN 15 blast wheels.
The team at the facility uses the overhead monorail machine from Wheelabrator for performance-critical shot peening of components after welding.
For years, they had been sourcing the most frequently changed blast wheel wear parts (blades, control cage, impeller) from a local supplier. The team decided to trial original parts from Wheelabrator to improve uptime after experiencing short and highly variable service life on the locally bought parts – sometimes they’d last up to eight weeks, but often as little as four, meaning they needed checking every four weeks.
The sheer volume of parts required per year across the eight wheels resulted in a high annual parts spend despite the relatively low cost per item.
From 4 weeks per blade set to 12…
The team initially approached Wheelabrator to trial standard original TITAN parts (tool steel) in direct comparison against the local version, measuring blade thickness over time as a proxy for wear.
Local blades: After four weeks (227 blasting hours), the local blades were down from the initial 12mm thickness to 2.2mm - hours away from holes appearing.
Standard Wheelabrator blades: Also starting with 12mm thickness, standard Wheelabrator parts were measuring 8.64mm after the same four weeks, only reaching the minimum acceptable thickness after clearing the 12-week mark.
The extra blasting hours per blade set already significantly reduced the number of checks and wear parts changes that would have to be carried out, saving at least one 8-hour maintenance stop in the period. As maintenance of the machine is outsourced to a third party, this translated into an immediate cost saving.
At the end of the initial trial period, in autumn 2025, Wheelabrator’s new patent-pending TITAN Endurance wear parts system became available and the customer team decided to trial it too, to see if maintenance intervals could be extended even further.
…and now to 20 weeks!
TITAN Endurance is a set of core blast wheel wear parts (blades, impeller, control cage) that have been designed and optimised as a system to dramatically extend wear life.
In trials at the Spanish facility, it managed to push maintenance intervals for blast wheels to over 20 weeks, with checks now down to only every ten weeks.
TITAN Endurance blades: At 9 weeks/380 blast hours Endurance blades were still at 10.2mm (from 12mm) thickness.
What’s more, with the TITAN Endurance system the wear life of blades, control cage and impeller have been synchronized by design, so they can be changed at the same time without giving up wear life on longer-life parts or letting the historically shorter-life blades run for too long. This simplifies parts logistics for the maintenance team, who had been changing control cage and impeller at every other blade change when using the old local parts.
The new wear parts have completely transformed shot peening operations at the facility, significantly reducing annual maintenance costs on the shot blast machine. Peening effectiveness and quality are more stable, too, in contrast to the old parts, where uneven wear towards the end of the blade life had been causing issues and rejects. The positive knock-on effects of the new wear parts on production are considerable – uptime is up, rejects are down, the line is producing more.
Discover more about TITAN Endurance
TITAN Endurance is currently available for TITAN 15.3 blast wheels and will be rolled out across other wheel families in the Wheelabrator portfolio (ATLAS, TITAN, EZX). Its development is part of a wider R&D effort at Wheelabrator to enhance the cost performance of existing blast wheels through innovative wear parts.
