Industrial Coatings Editing and Proofreading Services

A coating system is sold with a twenty-five-year specification. It says nothing false. What it also does not say is that twenty-five years means twenty-five years to first major maintenance, in a defined environment, on correctly prepared steel, with a stated area of breakdown considered acceptable — and that the same system on a coastal handrail with people leaning on it is a ten-year system at best.

We edit what industrial coatings manufacturers and applicators produce — durability and expected life claims, environmental classification documentation, system datasheets and their application windows, specification documents for asset owners, warranty and guarantee documentation, maintenance and repair specifications, inspection and condition assessment reports, product selection guidance for environments, technical service and troubleshooting responses, and long-term asset protection proposals. Our editors work on the durability claim an asset owner will budget against.

The expected life claim is where coatings documentation is either useful for asset planning or simply optimistic, and its failure is a number of years without the four things that define it. We work through these so the environment is stated by its classification with a plain description of what that means physically, since a corrosivity category is meaningless to an estates manager and "coastal, within 500 m of surf, with salt deposition" is not; so the claim is expressed as durability to first major maintenance rather than as a life, given that these are entirely different concepts and the industry's own standards say so explicitly; so the criterion for the end of that period is stated as a measurable degree of breakdown, because "failure" is judged differently by everybody; so the preparation and application conditions the claim depends on are listed at the point of the claim rather than in a separate datasheet, as a durability figure achieved on blasted steel does not transfer to a hand-prepared repair; so the specific features that will degrade first are named — edges, welds, bolt heads, contact points, areas of ponding — since a system that lasts twenty-five years on the flat and eight years on the edges needs a maintenance plan and not a warranty; so the maintenance the claim assumes is stated as a schedule with an owner; and so any warranty is described in terms of what it actually pays for. Claims written this way get specified by people planning budgets rather than believed and then resented.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, formulations and client information. We are editors rather than corrosion or coatings specialists, and we offer no view on durability, systems or performance. What we can do is attach the four conditions to the number of years.