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Show B 8 r'V Page ID Lakeside Review. Wednesday, May 22, 1985 T I i, - ',i . f ,,..ivu7HF vrr-::- :srA . t yv - &' . i , - 1 - '4 , W. r .j y 7 V rl;: 7 , v ;v i -- i -- , . HILL AIR FORCE BASE Robert A. Roberts, engineering ' technician at Hill Air Force Base, j could never be called an ordinary It government worker. I Roberts, 60, of Layton, is in-- I ventor of a plastic bead, paint . ; stripping process that will save the Air Force, Navy and Army millions of dollars. ,He has received the Air Force Citation of Honor, Associations ' the Air Force Logistics Command Outstanding Achievement Award and Air Force Inspector Generals ' Well Done Award and first place award for a paper he wrote on his I invention and submitted to the Society of Automotive Engineers. i He defied the logic of Wright Aeronautical Laboratories materi-- 1 als laboratory experts who said, Theres no way Roberts can do . what hes doing. -- - Before his invention was com- pleted, he helped design and lay out patterns for 77 different buildings at Hill Air Force Base, including facilities for Minute-ma- n , i . 5 - - 4 , 4 ! x, Missile repairs. Roberts work on the plastic material blasting method, as it is formally named, will probably be Lis claim to fame. work culminated in a ribbon cutting ceremony in May for a new aircraft blast booth at j Hill Air Force Base with Air Force generals Charles McCaus- land and Mark Reynolds and 4 Utah Congressman Jim Hansen i attending. - - The blast booth is the only one of its kind in the world. ,jj - As Roberts talked on the y phone at his Hill Air Force Base he emptied plastic beads . office, J the consistency of sand from his packets. The fine plastic dust set- j tied about his feet. Its in every- thing I own, he complained during a pause in his conversation as he shook his pockets inside out. My boots, everything. 'I JJe hung up and focused his at- lention on visitors who were t . there to see why a government worker would devise a different method of stripping aircraft paint I from fighter jets. I Roberts handed out some com- 1 plementary master blaster ccr- I tificates, prestigious papers he I designed for himself and all plas-- 1 ticj material blasters, and ex-- I plained his invention. I I just did it because it had to - - ! ' f f be done, I I I 1 1 , . he said. . Four and a half years ago, after 35, years with civil service, he was promoted to GS-1- 2 and assigned facility monitor for painting and stripping of 4 aircraft. I moved up here because of greed, he explained unconvinc-- 1 F-- tngly. - "" t , ' - '' ;V X ' r ' i.K ?vil Vv 7 decided there had to be a better way HlfAurtUl.i : 5 ; - y 7 a r t, - , ' ;-:- imiitii nil After being there a while, he 7 rrtiiii7i1ntiBiT .v i- The blast booth, bearing his For three years before the prototype operation, Roberts made initials, RAR, will be accompanied by two more booths built on 1,200 tests on every known malayers of paint and about the terial. He cured paint at high the base and will be turned over to Roberts some time in June. amount of time it took. heats to make sure paint condiI decided there had to be a tions would be the same as those The old chemical method of rebetter way, he said. on aircraft. moving paint will no longer be used. After two and a half years of It took a lot of time. We finalThe Navy is building plastic ly got to the point where the proexperimenting with those particular mediums available to the cess was viable, so I took it to material blast booths at North Isworld, he landed upon plastic four Air Force generals who told land Naval Air Station and at chips from old buttons ground to me, If you will do the job and Alemda Naval Air Station in Cala sand consistency. not retire we will give you the ifornia. Before his invention for 12 Some of those mediums were money. deRoberts wrote, edited, puband research received He walnut years, shells, peach pits, glass, rice hulls, corn cobs and alumivelopment funds of $525,000 lished, and took pictures for a from the Air Force for productivnum oxide. monthly barber shop Roberts led the visitors lo a ity, reliability, availability, mainquartet magazine. I mailed it huge hangar where he demontainability (PRAM) projects on from my own house, 42 copies a strated his process by placing his the idea. month, and I rounded up any In 1984 Royce Mechanical neighborhood kids willing to help hands in the gloves of windowed, welded glove booth and blasted Systems of Ogden was awarded stamp and sort. People would send articles for painted metal with the plastic the contract to build the blast the magazine two inches long, beads. He tested a type of tape booth. and I had to fill six inches, so Id This is my pride and joy, just delivered to him from a mastart writing. They did things Roberts said of the jor brand tape manufacturer. and Roberts insists on procurement they never knew they did. When he wasnt inventing or of quality products that will blast booth costing $642,000. A work, something that is not algrated metal floor allows paint singing, he had time to raise four and plastic to be pulled through children, divorce, remarry and ways easy to do in a military setand separated before plastic is re- raise another four children. ting. He now spends his spare time A $35,000 canopy was ruined cycled and reused for blasting. A crew of four blast upper water painting and building modusing brand X tape, so he billed it to procurement, said Carol parts of aircraft with hoses com- el ships. Roberts plans to blast a couple Douglas, tape company represening from the buildings walls. A fifth crew member sits in the more airplanes and then retire, he tative working with Roberts to find a tape that will stick and not designed to allow said, and Go out in a blaze of from the be eroded by the blasting materiproper angle be- glory. blasting neath the plane. al. Still in the first stages the He is one who will stick his will have to be redeneck out to make sure the job Archibald Roberts done said, so all three Story by Cheryl right. signed, gets mag wheels swivel. I was sliding the Photos by Rodney Wright Roberts first chine was a small portable. After thing with me, he said of his test blast under an he settled on the plastic medium, jet. he experimented with larger g machines. His supervisors gave him approval to experiment as long as it didnt interfere with his regular job, he said. In July, 1984, crews stripped Protopaint from the first type at the base. An average of coats of paint were removed by 40 pounds of pressure blasting plastic beads through a nozzle, taking 39 hours. That time has since been reduced to 25 hours. Using the present chemical process, crews would have taken 341 hours to do the job. A hundred pounds of dry waste was left after the old paint job was completed. With the old process, 20,000 gallons of chemicals and water would have remained to be disbecame concerned about the hazardous chemicals used to dissolve 32-pa- ge 20'2-foot-hi- blast-mobi- le blast-mobi- le sand-blastin- F-4- E sand-blastin- F-4- E 1 1 posed of. Subsurface metal on the prototype was undamaged because the e. plastic is The pressure removes the paint. And the beads are softer than steel or glass, but harder than paint, Roberts explained. && ' i. s Wf i kkw Mtei |