Occasionally we hear from a customer who has a small section of bare pipe that they need to coat. It isn't always practical or easy to find just a few feet of coated pipe. Historically, this would have been called 'over the ditch' coating and Polyken tapes would have been one of the industry leaders for the application. In today's world, it is more often done by heat shrinkable sleeves. Straight line pipe can be coated by overlapping WPCT shrink sleeves to forum a continues pipeline coating. When bends are involved, our Flexclad can be used to form a technically superior coating throughout the weld area.
We recently had a customer use our product for just such an application. We were very fortunate as well to get photos of the fully installed product.
A beautiful bird's eye view of the recently coated pipeline.
WPCT installed in a parking lot prior to being moved to the ditch for burial.
Flexclad heat shrinkable tape installed on a pipe bend.
All came off without a hitch and the end user was pleased with the results. See below for WPCT installation video when 'lobster backing' the shrink sleeves.
WPCT can be installed over a wire brushed pipe surface. The steel must be preheated to 140F prior to wrapping and shrinking the sleeve. Each sleeve is installed to overlap the preceding sleeve by at least 3 inches (more is perfectly acceptable). Under this scenario, each 34" wide sleeve would essentially provide 28-30 inches of coverage. So, each 10 foot section of bare pipe will require 4.28 sleeves to coat (could be rounded up to five, or could be a mixture of 34" wide WPCT shrink sleeves and 11" wide WPCT shrink sleeves.
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