Kyokuyo's brand-new all-weather blasting factory started its operation in November. This new facility, located adjacently to the existing all-weather block assembly factory, is dedicated to surface preparation of the building blocks just assembled. Armed with air conditioning and dehumidifying system, it assures an ideal environment for grid-blasting operations at any time regardless of weather, temperature and humidity outside of the premise.

Like many others, we have been treating metal surfaces in open-air shops with sand-blasters and disk sanders. While this traditional approach is handy, it can create bottleneck in manufacturing flow as the ambient condition changes. Quite often, you need to carefully determine the best timing to carry out the operation, which may eventually affect quality of the final product.

Through our experiences with many international customers, we are keenly aware that precise control over quality and manufacturing schedule is an essential element in building process of high standard ships. With our new factory, we expected to go one step further. In fact, an English superintendent now staying in our yard assured that quality level of surface preparation was so good that no special checking was required any more.

This small step has a big significance to us, because it will certainly contribute to realizing our long-standing goal of production capacity expansion to 6 units per year. In technical aspect, it made us easy to respond to new higher standard about painting quality and specification to be set by ISO in future.

Kyokuyo will keep our steps firmly on our path of perfection and efficiency.

[2005/12/11]