Heat Shrink Sleeves: Essential Information for Accurate Quotes

 Heat Shrink Sleeves: Essential Information for Accurate Quotes

At Joint Specialists, we understand the practical realities of the buying process. Often, field joint coatings are among the last details to be addressed. In fact, a significant portion of our orders fall into the "emergency" or "hot tail gate rush" category. Nevertheless, even for these urgent orders, we require some fundamental information to provide suitable recommendations and pricing for shrink sleeve products.

While having access to the Field Joint Coating Specification makes our job easier (despite the need to sift through extensive technical data), there are basic details we need to know:

1. Outside Diameter of the Pipeline: This information determines the appropriate size of the shrink sleeve needed—whether it should be larger or smaller.

2. Operating Temperature during Service: Covalence manufactures various shrink sleeves with different types of adhesives. Knowing the operating temperature is crucial because it significantly affects adhesive performance.

3. Factory Applied Coating: Not all adhesives are compatible with every factory applied line coating. For example, hot melt adhesives are generally not compatible with Polypropylene. We aim to avoid discovering such incompatibilities in the field, especially during pipe laying operations that incur substantial daily costs.

4. Cutbacks: A cutback refers to the amount of bare steel between the factory applied coating and the pipe's end. To determine the extent of bare steel at a field joint, we double the cutback measurement. This helps us ascertain the necessary width of the shrink sleeve (refer to here and here for more details).

Lastly, we need to know the application specifics, such as whether it's a standard "drop in the ditch" pipeline, road bore, directional drill, high-temperature line, onshore, above ground, offshore, deep water, S-Lay, or J-Lay. The answers to these questions can impact the recommendations we provide.

We understand that gathering this information may appear overwhelming at first glance. However, it's not as challenging as it seems. Every joint of oil and gas pipeline requires some form of field joint coating. This presents an opportunity to increase your sales and profits modestly while offering a valuable service to customers who might otherwise choose the wrong product. Furthermore, by partnering with Joint Specialists, you have access to product experts who are just a phone call (936/321-3333) or email (steve@jsicoatings.com) away.