In the last decade there has been an explosion in the amount of hot-dip galvanized trailers of all kinds. The clear performance superiority of galvanized steel on these products is leading manufacturers of other roadway related equipment to seek out the value and performance advantages of galvanizing for themselves. An excellent example is this new quick-change snow plow and ice scraper.

The idea for this new road clearing implement is that a single device could first remove large quantities of snow from a road or parking surface and then with a quick onsite flip the underlying ice buildup could be grated away leaving a fully cleared surface ready for safe use.

It's hard to imagine a product that is more self destructive than a snow plow; erosion, corrosion and impacts, you name it, it happens. Road salt, sand, grit, gravel, curbs, hidden objects they all conspire to destroy the plow every day even when not in use. When the manufacturer decided to design a dual-purpose plow that could both push and accumulate snow in a large bucket as well as scrape away hard ice with just a 180-degree rotation these above-mentioned challenges become even more of a problem. The scraping surface requires high pressure to successfully separate surface ice buildup from the asphalt or concrete roadway. This added pressure against course road surfaces would instantly destroy any applied anti-corrosion coatings such as paint.

The stand out solution was hot-dip galvanizing for its well-known ability to provide long service life at low cost but a deeper look into the surface itself of a Hot-Dipped product revealed even more impressive qualities particularly beneficial for this application.

First, despite the common vernacular referring to galvanizing as a “coating” it is actually a surface alloy. Between the steel itself and the pure zinc outer layer three distinct layers of alloyed metals form. Each of these three layers are much harder than the steel itself and two of them are about two and a half times harder. So not only does HDG provide amazing corrosion protection it also provides anti-wear protection not only for itself but for the actual steel product it envelops.

Secondly, even if under extreme cases where abrasion and impacts do damage to the coating or even the steel itself the cathodic “back up plan” of hot-dip galvanizing kicks in with it’s nearly miraculous ability to “heal” itself with zinc migration to the damaged areas.

All this happens even inside the tubular braces of these plows and all often at a lower cost than poorly performing paints and at a tiny fraction the cost of exotic alternatives to steel construction. These plow-scrapers are an extreme service examples of the incomparable, value-added performance of hot-dip galvanizing!