Published

1 year ago

March 20, 2025

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

IntoMachines: Smarter Turbine Bolt Tensioning

Martin Kristelijn, the co-founder of IntoMachines, discusses innovative tools designed to make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and less expensive. The conversation highlights the challenges of manually tensioning thousands of bolts, the advantages of automated bolt tensioning for wind turbines, and the development of a weightless, more efficient tensioning system.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug!

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Allen Hall: With wind turbines growing larger and bolts getting bigger, the industry needs smarter ways to handle critical bolted connections. This week we speak with Martin Kristelijn co-founder of IntoMachines. IntoMachines has developed unique tools that make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and much less expensive.

Welcome to Uptime, spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Martin, welcome to. To the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.

Martin Kristelijn: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Allen Hall: Martin, there’s a big problem out in the field that we have a lot of bolts to tension and not a lot of people to go do it. Plus I think as you and I had discussed previously, the bolt sizers are getting much bigger.

Everything is becoming heavier and just being very difficult to do into machines changes all that. But let’s talk about the problem first. What are you seeing on factory lines and out in service as people try to tension bolts.

Martin Kristelijn: Past couple of months, year, I would say we spoke to a lot of people visited wind turbines, went in the field, see our technicians tighten the bolts also to the factories, so Elle production you name it.

And well, the, we kept on keeping getting the same feedback over and over. That they would like to speed up the bolting process and also that they would like to increase the quality, so to prevent any loose bolts or forgotten bolts. That was really the starting point for us. We started to focus on bolt tensioning, to automate it, to speed it up, and to increase the quality.

Allen Hall: So tensioning is the way going forward. A lot of of us remember torquing as being the preferred method to tighten bolts, but tensioning is now the way you wanna describe why that is?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, still it depends on who you ask, but the main objective for everyone usually is to get a maintenance free building connection, right?

That you keep the maintenance cost as low as possible. So that’s also our goal. And bolt tensioning for us is the most yeah. Convenient way forward to reach that.

Allen Hall: It’s the most consistent way too, right? Is that with torquing, we really don’t know what the preload is on the bolt. That’s why engineers are preferring tension tools instead of torquing tools now.

Martin Kristelijn: Exactly. So with torquing you have a friction coefficient you need to take into account. That’s an unpredictable. Value parameter. So you would like to get rid of that. And you do that by just grabbing the bolt itself, apply hydraulic pressure and stretch the bolt directly. And then you have your hydraulic pressure times the surface of your tension to, and that gives you exactly the the preload in your bolt and you tighten the nut, release the pressure, and your bolt is perfectly pretense.

As simple as that,

Allen Hall: right? So that process takes time to do. And if you have a factory worker or a technician doing tensioning to a lot of bolts of which there are thousands on a wind turbine but there’s probably what, a couple hundred that are critical.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So around, give or take, 600 bolts critical bolted connections in a wind turbine.

And imagine that I said tightening the nut by hand. You have a wrench wrenching each of those 600 bolts. Then you have your pull bar. You need to thread that onto your bolt as well, or bolt stop bolt. Yeah, I can tell you that you don’t want to do that all day by hand.

Allen Hall: So how does that work right now in, in the factories?

If they’re doing it by hand? Is it are they changing people at that station because it just has to wear you out? Those bolts are big and that technique of tensioning manually is tiresome, right?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, exactly. We visited some factories as well and also the installation sites. And the feedback we got is that people they hurt their arm.

And not after the 10 bolt, not after the a hundred bolt maybe. But after a thousand volts your arm really starts to hurt. And yeah. That’s not good for your workforce, right? People need to be happy they need to be coming to work with a smile and we try to, to accomplish that by automating this this job.

Allen Hall: Joel, if I had a tension a thousand bolts a day on Monday, I don’t, not sure. I would be going back on Tuesday, would you?

Joel Saxum: No. And I think of that on Saturday and Sunday. I’m definitely trying to get as much rest as possible. But if you, but you make this a little bit more, think about the complication here is because as the global fleet.

Grows. Okay. The conversation we just had was about in the factory in a controlled setting. That’s one thing, right? Like you can have these into machines like it, it’s a good size tool. There’s a lot of weight there. There’s, you have the classical tensioning tools, like that’s.

It’s all hydraulic, like there’s a lot of things, but it’s controlled because you’re in a factory, at least you have decent conditions to work in. Even now, see the fleet grow and see what the, the projections are for how many wind turbines are gonna be installed over the next 2, 5, 10, 20 years globally.

This is a problem that you guys are solving for people in the field in a big way, and that’s the important part for me, when I talk to technicians and I talk to people in the field. You’re lugging this equipment, it’s the classical equipment. You’re lugging it up there and you’re doing this and it’s strain and drain on the body.

And then we know that’s when the body gets worn down, then the mind gets worn down and that’s when HSE in incidents happen and we’re trying to reduce all of those things. That’s what you guys are working on. When someone goes into the field with this kit what are you guys seeing for the change in the operators or the change in the technicians?

Are they, do they have a big smile on their face when they see something like this?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. They, at least when we see them with our stuff in their hands, then they smile a lot. Yes. But no the bottom line is that the, this tool says, so for 42 attention tool, you are looking at 1520 kilograms.

With some electric motors on it, and that goes up to 50 kilograms or 60 for M 72 tensioner.

Allen Hall: That’s a hundred pounds Joel in America. That’s a very heavy tool.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So you need to carry that along, let’s say 150 bolts in a flinch, and that’s one flange. Exactly. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And so like you, you go to an onshore turbine, say even your flange bolts, you have bolts on the foundation, then you have.

A lot of times, four to five tower sections, those all have to be bolted together.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And now, and then you talk up in the nelle and you’re, you have the blade bolts that have to get attention and all kinds of things. So like you said, 600 different connections that need to be worked on.

So that was

Martin Kristelijn: Let’s say our starting point heavy tooling. And we thought, okay, how can we make these tools weightless for the operators and move them fast from one ball to the other? Because that’s also a thing you need to move it fast from one bolt to the other to complete your 150 bolts in time because in the end before dark, you want to go home, you need to finish the bolt bolts.

So what we did there is we designed a very specific lift trolley. It’s very low and compact, very lightweight as well. So you should have let’s say less problems with passing obstacles. For example, you have the stairs in the wind turbine and due to our low trolley design, it usually should go underneath the stairs.

So you’re not bothered by that. And it makes attention to weightless. If you combine. That literally with the automated tensioning tool we made. Yeah. Then you have an unbeatable system.

Allen Hall: Yeah. So that’s what in two machines has done, and your team over there are mechanical geniuses. You actually make the tension tool quasi weightless by using mechanical means.

So you’ve designed. Very smart systems tools in which the tension tool adapts into to make it so much easier to do. And we’re gonna put some of these tensioning tool improvement devices, I’ll call them on the YouTube version so people can see them. But the simplest version of this is the trolley.

And maybe Martin, you can describe what this thing is because. It’s a little hard to see. We’ll put it on YouTube, obviously. But for those listening, what does the trolley do in terms of the tensioning unit?

Martin Kristelijn: First of all it needs to operate in a very r rugged environment as a wind turbine.

So it needs to be super, super simple. It needs to be super robust and easy to maintain. We took, design. It’s made of steel, galvanized steel, so you can hit it with a hammer and it should still work. Then we made some nice interface brackets that you can just hang your attention to in the trolley.

Okay, and we have just a very simple gas spring, which compensates the weight of the tension tool.

Allen Hall: Okay? So now when you’re putting together tower sections, if you have this trolley that’s holding the tension tool, and so the technician is just using almost no force to lift the tension tool, make the tension tool do its thing and move it to the next bolt.

That I’ve watched that tool on your LinkedIn page, it is quite remarkable how fast that tool is. Just by making it more mobile and taking some of the weight away from the technician, that technician is much more productive.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. If you have the trolley and then you have our smart tensioning system it is motorized.

So the tension tool comes from our partner Tension Pro. They’re very good at making tension tools. So we partnered up with them and we said, Hey, let’s make a kick ass product which we call the quantum Smart Tensioner. So they are very good at making tensioners. We are very good in developing user-friendly software and mechatronics.

So electric motors put that all together in the quantum system. And the basis for the quantum system, again, is a super robust system. Easy to maintain, easy to operate, and it yeah, no bells and whistles, let’s say. And so you don’t want it to break down. It needs to be a usable for practical people.

Let’s say, Ellen, if I take you in a wind turbine, I want to give you our quantum system. I will give you a 15 minute explanation, and then it’s so easy to operate that you can do the bolting works for us.

Allen Hall: Wow, that’s impressive because I’m probably not very good at that job. Martin, that Martin, that’s a big task you just took on.

But I have watched it. I’ve watched your videos and I do think I could do it.

Martin Kristelijn: I think so too, because I really believe in our content. Quantum system, so I really think you could do it for us.

Allen Hall: That tool is universal. It can be used in any tower, essentially anywhere. To speed up that process to get bolts, tensioned, and have all the quality data that you need, and to know that tower section has been properly installed now.

I’ve seen some more advancements on LinkedIn. I saw this little robot that was crawling around doing bolt tensioning, and it just blew my mind and that’s why I reached out to you like, whoa, okay, this is life altering for people. You wanna explain what that next generation is from the trolley up to this sort of crawling robot tensioning tool?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. So our vision for the bold tensioning markets is that we want to speed up the process. To tension all those bolts quicker for the coming turbines and also to prevent any loose bolts. You do that by documenting each bolted connection. So we register the pressure, we register the nut angle, we register at the nut torque, we register the boat number.

All that stuff is nicely registered in a A PDF document. However if you can speed it up even more by using a robotic system, that’s our end goal. At the moment we are developing a autonomous bolt tensioning robot for blade bolts. So it’s it’s working in an cell factory there.

It’s just crawling around the hip. Tensioning all the bolts one by one. And then we develop we develop the quantum system in such a way that for the near future, let’s say yeah, coming year you can have the quantum system with a literally, and then a technician will operate it.

But that same quantum smart tensioner in one year, if we’ve launched the robot for, field usage. You can place that same quantum smart tensioner inside our robot and have a fully automated and autonomous bolt tensioning system.

Joel Saxum: I think an important thing to touch on here, Martin, is what the developments that you guys are doing.

We, when we said it earlier you’re experts in software, me and mechatronics. I’ve been around the robotics industry in wind, in oil and gas and sub-C, oil and gas. The best pieces of kit that come out that do that automated process or automate a task are ones like exactly like in two machines has created here that are robust and simple to operate.

There’s way too many tools out there that require a software engineer to be on site to do these things, right? Like when autonomous drones first came out for inspections in turbines. You would see three people at the base of the turbine and two of those people were literally software engineers, like going through code and fixing things and people got a little bit turned off by ’em ah, I can’t be doing this.

Or, I’ve been on sub c oil and gas projects before where you gotta. Fly an ROV technician, a mechatronics expert in from Norway for $2,500 a day to solve this problem that’s happening in Nigeria. Like you can’t have that, like that. That is a barrier to entry for robotics in this space.

You guys have taken the leap past that you’ve made it simple. You’ve made it robust, you’ve made it tough. You’ve made it so that people can operate these things without having a, a year long training course, and that you guys don’t have to be there to do it for them. So I think that’s one of the most important things to get across here for people that are listening, is if you want to make your operations more efficient in the field, if you want to have good data tracking for the tension that you’ve done.

Into machines has done the hard work, they’ve done the legwork to get to that stage. So I guess a question for you then, Martin, is what does it look like? What’s your track record in the field? How many of these things, how many bolts have you guys tensioned? What does it look like?

Martin Kristelijn: I have to say the product has launched quite recently.

We have several customers that say who are using the system. And the feedback we get back from them is indeed yeah, compared to what they had is that it’s faster and easier to operate, but also that we and that’s very difficult to have to say that we don’t have a lot of sensors. We don’t have difficult software.

So it’s all straightforward to operate what I said with 15 minutes, I can teach Alan how to tension a flinch altogether with the quantum system. Yeah we really went back to basic. We stripped all the unnecessary stuff from it, which could break down. We took it off and only the bare minimum we kept such that the guys in the field that they need to use it every day, that they’re also happy to use it.

And indeed they don’t need to read the user manual every day before they start a job. That’s not what we want.

Allen Hall: You must be the technician’s best friend after they use that tool for a day or two. They must love into machines.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Yeah. We, yeah, actually we always say what I said, we always go go away with the smile from our turbines and the guys trying our our equipment as well.

So that’s always really good feedback.

Joel Saxum: I think there’s something to be said there too for the global problem that we have, I in, in the wind world is technician shortage, right? And so we’ve talked to Alan and I’ve talked to quite a few people working in this space. How do we tackle this problem?

How can we get more training, get more people in here? One of the things that we can ensure that we can do is make it easier for the technicians in the field to get up to speed fast, to be able to get a task done without having to have five years of experience to figure out how to do it. So now you can bring someone that’s fairly green to the industry.

They’ve got their safety certifications. They know what they’re doing. They know their way around a turbine, but now they can be. The torque or the, I would say the torque tensioning technician, but I’ll say the tensioning tech technician. But they can do it in a relatively short amount of time, so that helps the overall industry and or, an ISP or an EPC contract or whatever it is, scale their workforce up faster to get more projects done.

With high quality at speed, and that’s what we want. That’s the, you guys are doing, you’re doing the hard work, the heavy lifting for the industry.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. That was for us also one key factor to make this thing work. Because what I said, we are a relatively new player into machines is now five years old.

And yeah, we set together with tension problem. We said, okay, in order to make this work. It’s you should be operated, be able to operate it within that 15 minutes and maybe, okay, maybe it takes you half an hour, but then you really are up to speed with the system and you yeah you just can go for it.

So speed is really really important for us.

Allen Hall: So where is in two machines at, on the planet at the moment? I know you’re all over Europe. Are you in the States? Are you in Australia or are you in South America?

Martin Kristelijn: Our office is based in the Netherlands. So that, that’s Europe. Then we have some systems in Europe itself.

We have some systems in Asia, and we’re now looking in looking for the US So we have some, some talks there to to launch the product.

Allen Hall: I could see a lot of opportunity in the United States, and Joel and I have been to some of those places and watched bolts being assembled manually.

It just seemed like an arduous process. And because I, I think a lot of operators have not seen you in, a lot of technicians haven’t seen you. They need to get to your website and check this out. Where do they go?

Martin Kristelijn: The first thing they go is to into machines.com. That I see some product videos of us had to get a feel of how it looks, how it works, the products.

So the lift trolleys the quantum system, quantum Smart Tensioner, as well as the fully autonomous tensioning robot. And we have a very active LinkedIn page into machines where you can see also videos inside wind turbines where we have the trolleys. The lift rolls and also the robots jumping around on a flinch.

So that’s that’s the stuff you want to see.

Allen Hall: Martin, if I wanna demo one of your robotic assistants and make tensioning so much easier, how do I do that? Can I get my hands on the tool to try it out?

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, you can. So the first thing you do or you can do is send us an email sales@intomachines.com.

Then we we’ll arrange, a demo for you and the second is send us a DM on the link LinkedIn page. Then we we’ll also organize a demo and an online call to answer all the questions.

Allen Hall: And once you try it, you’re going to want to buy it because that tool is gonna save you a tremendous amount of time.

And so you need to check out into machines.com if you wanna see all the wonderful things that Martin and his team has designed. Martin, you’re always coming up with really cool ideas and putting ’em into action and saving the wind industry. Tremendous amount of labor and time and effort in making the job simpler, which is what we need to do.

So congratulations, really good tools.

Martin Kristelijn: Thank you very much for that.

Allen Hall: And thanks for being on the podcast. We love having you on.

Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, I also loved speaking to you about about these topics. Really nice.

https://weatherguardwind.com/intomachines-turbine-bolt-tensioning/

Renewable Energy

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes

Published

1 day ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes

Bret Tollgaard from Sunrez joins to discuss UV-curing prepreg that cuts blade repair time by up to 90% and has recently recieved OEM approval.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Allen Hall: Brett, welcome back to the program.

Bret Tollgaard: Thanks for having me again.

Allen Hall: So a lot’s happening at sunrise at the moment. Uh, there’s, uh, activity with sunrise materials on a lot of blades this year.

Over the last couple of years actually, ISPs, operators, OEMs, are realizing that UV curing is a huge advantage.

Bret Tollgaard: Turns out there’s a lot of value added, uh, to the entire process when utilizing UV cure, uh, pre-req.

Allen Hall: So the, the pre pres are, have been available for a couple of years. The qualification though was always the concern.

Has the OEM qualified this material? Are they gonna give you the blessing? Does this show up in the manual? If I call the OEM, are they gonna say they have talked to you guys? A lot of those hurdles have been cleared at this point.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, great question. And we are happy to announce that we have finally been approved by a large OEM for use on the epoxy blade for now all general kind of repairs.

We have several more OEMs that have already passed their phase one mechanical testing, and we’re iterating through now [00:01:00] their, uh, secondary and tertiary kind of tests. And so we do expect to be fully qualified by several OEMs before the end of the year, which should make the ISPs integration and utilization of our materials much, much easier.

Allen Hall: So the, the, the problem you’re solving is repairs in the field for the most part, or sometimes in the factory. Mm-hmm. But a lot of times in the field that those repairs. It happened quite a bit. They’re the same repair, the same area, the same kind of thing over and over and over again. And wetting out fabric on site takes time.

Particularly if you’re using standard materials, you have to bag it. You have to apply heat in some cases to get it to kick, and then you have to wait several hours for it to cure. So in the repair cycle time, most of your time is waiting.

Bret Tollgaard: It sure is. Uh, and on top of all that, we all know that there aren’t enough technicians in this industry to even do all the repairs, uh, that would like to be done.

Yeah. And so to really kind of streamline all of that, [00:02:00] uh, we’ve rolled out a couple of new things and we’ve had a lot more interest in some pre consolidated preki patches for customers. Uh, if a particular blade model has an issue that is a standardized kind of repair. We’re actually now building custom prepregs, or we will build the appropriate width length, stack it, consolidate it, uh, wrap it between our films.

So then all the customer has to do when they get on site is, uh, you know, do do the appropriate surface prep. Scarfing, apply a little bit of our UV surface primer to the backside of that patch. But now they can go up tower, single peel, stick, roll out, and then they’re cured.

Allen Hall: And that’s a. How many hours of saving is that?

It’s gotta be like six, 12 hours of saving, of, of

Bret Tollgaard: labor. It’s upwards of 80 to 90% of the labor that’s gonna actually need to be done to apply that. Otherwise, and then same thing too. We’ve had a couple instances where we took a several day repair down to one, to two to three hours. And these are multi-meter long repairs that were fast tracked because we pre consolidated preki [00:03:00] everything.

Some were in flat sheet forms, some were much longer on rolls, where you’re actually then rolling out with a team. Um, and so we’ve been able to demonstrate several times, uh, over the last 12 months, uh, the, the value that a UV cure preprint.

Allen Hall: Well, sure, because that, that would make sense. The issue about wetting out fabric in the field you just done in the back of a trailer or something, somewhere like that.

Usually it is, it’s that you’re never really sure that you got the fabric wetted out. The experienced technicians always feel like, have done it enough that they get very consistent results. But as you mentioned, getting technicians is hard and, and there’s so many repairs to do. So you’re doing those wetting out composite things takes practice and skill.

Just buying it, preki it, where you have control over it. And you guys sell to the military all the time. So that, and you’re, are you ass 91 qualified yet? You’re in the midst of that?

Bret Tollgaard: So we, I mean, a, we just got ISO certified, uh, at the end of last year in December. So our [00:04:00] QMS system and everything like that’s up to date, that’s huge.

Another big qualification for the OEMs that want to see, you know, true quality and output.

Allen Hall: That’s it. I, if I’m gonna buy a preki patch, so, uh, uh, that would make sense to me, knowing that. There’s a lot of rigor as a quality system. So when I get out the the site and I open that package, I know what’s inside of it every single time.

Bret Tollgaard: Well, and that’s just it. And like we got qualified based on the materials that we can provide and the testing that’s being done in real world situations when you’re wetting out by hand and you’re vacuum backing and you’re trying to cure. It is a little bit of an art form when you’re doing that. It is, and you might think you have a great laminate, you got void content, or you haven’t properly went out that glass ’cause humidity or the way the glass was stored or it was exposed.

The sizing and the resin don’t really bite. Well. You might think you have a great repair, but you might be prematurely failing as well after X cycles and fatigue. Uh, simply because it’s not as easy to, to truly do. Right? And so having the [00:05:00] pre-wet, uh, pre impregnated glass really goes a long way for the quality, uh, and the consistency from repair to repair.

Allen Hall: Well, even just the length of the season to do repairs is a huge issue. I, I know I’ve had some discussions this week about opening the season up a little bit, and some of the ISPs have said, Hey, we we’re pretty much working year round at this point. We’re, we’ll go to California. We’ll go to Southern Texas.

We’ll work those situations. ’cause the weather’s decent, but with the sunrise material, the temperature doesn’t matter.

Bret Tollgaard: Correct. And I was actually just speaking to someone maybe half hour ago who came by and was talking about repairs that they had to do in Vermont, uh, in December. They could only do two layers of an epoxy repair at a time because of the amount of the temperature.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Whereas you could go through, apply a six or an eight layer pre-reg cure it in 20 minutes. Uh, you know, throughout that entire length that he had and you would’ve been done. That’s, and so it took several days to do a single repair that could have been done in sub one hour with our material.

Allen Hall: I know where those wind turbines are.

[00:06:00] They weren’t very far from, we used to live, so I understand that temperature, once you hit about November up in Vermont, it’s over for a lot of, uh, standard epoxy materials and cures, it is just not warm enough.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, we, we’ve literally had repairs done with our materials at negative 20 Fahrenheit. That were supposed to be temporary repairs.

They were installed four or five years ago. Uh, and they’re still active, perfectly done patches that haven’t needed to be replaced yet. So,

Allen Hall: so, because the magic ingredient is you’re adding UV to a, a chemistry where the UV kicks it off. Correct. Basically, so you’re, it’s not activated until it’s hit with uv.

You hit it with uv that starts a chemical process, but it doesn’t rely on external heat. To cure

Bret Tollgaard: exactly. It, it is a true single component system, whether it’s in the liquid pre preg, the thickened, uh, the thickened putties that we sell, or even the hand lamination and effusion resin. It’s doped with a, a variety of different food initiators and packages based on the type of light that’s [00:07:00] being, uh, used to, to cure it.

But it will truly stay dormant until it’s exposed to UV light. And so we’ve been able to formulate systems over the last 40 years of our company’s history that provide an incredibly long shelf life. Don’t prematurely gel, don’t prematurely, uh, you know, erode in the packaging, all those

Allen Hall: things.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly.

Like we’ve been at this for a really long time. We’ve been able to do literally decades of r and d to develop out systems. Uh, and that’s why we’ve been able to come to this market with some materials that truly just haven’t been able to be seen, uh, delivered and installed and cured the way that we can do it.

Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s a huge thing, the, the shelf life.

Bret Tollgaard: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: You talk to a lot of. Operators, ISPs that buy materials that do have an expiration date or they gotta keep in a freezer and all those little handling things.

Bret Tollgaard: Yep.

Allen Hall: Sunrise gets rid of all of that. And because how many times have you heard of an is SP saying, oh, we had a throwaway material at the end of the season because it expired.

Bret Tollgaard: Oh, tremendously

Allen Hall: amount of, hundred of thousands of dollars of material, [00:08:00]

Bret Tollgaard: and I would probably even argue, say, millions of dollars over the course of the year gets, gets thrown out simply because of the expiration date. Um, we are so confident in our materials. Uh, and the distributors and stuff that we use, we can also recertify material now, most of the time it’s gonna get consumed within 12 months Sure.

Going into this kind of industry.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, but there have been several times where we’ve actually had some of that material sent back to us. We’ll test and analyze it, make sure it’s curing the way it is, give it another six months shelf, uh, service life.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, and so you’re good to go on that front

Allen Hall: too.

Yeah. So if you make the spend to, to move to sun, you have time to use it.

Bret Tollgaard: Yes.

Allen Hall: So if it snows early or whatever’s going on at that site where you can’t get access anymore, you just wait till the spring comes and you’re still good with the same material. You don’t have to re-buy it.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And with no special storage requirements, like you mentioned, no frozen oven or frozen freezer, excuse me, uh, or certain temperature windows that has to be stored in, uh, it allows the operators and the technicians, you know, a lot more latitude of how things actually get

Allen Hall: done.

And, and so if. When we [00:09:00] think about UV materials, the, the questions always pop up, like, how thick of a laminate can you do and still illuminate with the UV light? And make sure you curate I I, because you’re showing some samples here. These are,

Bret Tollgaard: yeah.

Allen Hall: Quarter inch or more,

Bret Tollgaard: correct. So

Allen Hall: thick samples. How did you cure these?

Bret Tollgaard: So that was cured with the lamp that we’ve got right here, which are standard issued light, sold a couple hundred into this space already. Um, that’s 10 layers of a thousand GSM unidirectional fiber. Whoa. This other one is, uh, 10 layers of, of a biox. 800 fiber.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Bret Tollgaard: Uh, those were cured in six minutes. So you can Six

Allen Hall: minutes.

Bret Tollgaard: Six minutes.

Allen Hall: What would it take to do this in a standard epoxy form?

Bret Tollgaard: Oh, hours,

Allen Hall: eight hours maybe?

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. About for, for the, for the post cure required to get the TGS that they need in the wind space, right? Absolutely. And so yeah, we can do that in true minutes. And it’s pre impregnated. You simply cut it to shape and you’re ready to rock.

Allen Hall: And it looks great when you’re done, mean the, the surface finish is really good. I know sometimes with the epoxies, particularly if they get ’em wetted out, it doesn’t. It [00:10:00] doesn’t have that kind of like finished look to it.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And the way that we provide, uh, for our standard, uh, you know, pre pprs are in between films and so if you cure with that film, you get a nice, clean, glossy surface tack free.

But as more and more people go to the pre consolidation method down tower, so even if they buy our standard prereg sheets or rolls, they’re preki down tower, you can also then just apply a pre, uh, a peel ply to that top film. Oh, sure. So if you wet out a peel ply and then you build your laminate over the top.

Put the primer and the black film over when they actually get that up on tower, they can then just remove that fuel ply and go straight to Sandy or uh, uh, painting and they’re ready to rock.

Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. That’s, that’s impressive. If you think about the thousands and thousands of hours you’ll save in a season.

Where you could be fixing another blade, but you’re just waiting for the res, the cure,

Bret Tollgaard: and that’s just it. When you’re saving the amount of labor and the amount of time, and it’s not just one technician, it’s their entire team that is saving that time. Sure. And can move on to the next [00:11:00] repair and the next process.

Allen Hall: So one of the questions I get asked all the time, like, okay, great, this UV material sounds like space, age stuff. It must cost a fortune. And the answer is no. It doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s very price competitive.

Bret Tollgaard: It, it really is. And it might be slightly more expensive cost per square foot versus you doing it with glass and resin, but you’re paying for that labor to wait for that thing to cure.

And so you’re still saving 20, 30, 40 plus percent per repair. When you can do it as quickly as we can do it.

Allen Hall: So for ISPs that are out doing blade repairs, you’re actually making more money.

Bret Tollgaard: You are making more money, you are saving more money. That same group and band of technicians you have are doing more repairs in a faster amount of time.

So as you are charging per repair, per blade, per turbine, whatever that might be, uh, you’re walking away with more money and you can still pass that on to the owner operators, uh, by getting their turbines up and spinning and making them more money.

Allen Hall: Right. And that’s what happens now. You see in today’s world, companies ISPs that are proposing [00:12:00] using UV materials versus standard resin systems, the standard residence systems are losing because how much extra time they’re, they’re paying for the technicians to be on site.

Bret Tollgaard: Correct.

Allen Hall: So the, the industry has to move if you wanna be. Competitive at all. As an ISP, you’re gonna have to move to UV materials. You better be calling suns

Bret Tollgaard: very quickly. Well, especially as this last winter has come through, the windows that you have before, bad weather comes in on any given day, ebbs and flows and changes.

But when you can get up, finish a repair, get it spinning, you might finish that work 2, 3, 4 later, uh, days later. But that turbine’s now been spinning for several days, generating money. Uh, and then you can come back up and paint and do whatever kind of cosmetic work over the top of that patch is required.

Allen Hall: So what are the extra tools I need to use Sunz in the kits. Do I need a light?

Bret Tollgaard: Not a whole lot. You’re gonna need yourself a light. Okay. You’re gonna need yourself a standard three to six inch, uh, bubble buster roller to actually compact and consolidate. Sure. Uh, that’s really all you need. There’s no vacuum lights.

And you sell the lights. We do, we, [00:13:00] we sell the lights. Um, our distributors also sell the lights, fiberglass and comp one. Uh, so they’re sourced and available, uh, okay. Domestically, but we sell worldwide too. And so, uh, we can handle you wherever you are in the world that you wanna start using uv, uh, materials.

And yeah, we have some standardized, uh, glass, but at the same time, we can pre-reg up to a 50 inch wide roll. Okay, so then it really becomes the limiting factor of how wide, how heavy, uh, of a lamette does a, a technician in the field want to handle?

Allen Hall: Yeah, sure. Okay. In terms of safety, with UV light, you’re gonna be wearing UV glasses,

Bret Tollgaard: some standard safety glasses that are tinted for UV protection.

So they’ll

Allen Hall: look yellow,

Bret Tollgaard: they’ll look a little yellow. They’ve got the shaded gray ones. Sunglasses, honestly do the same.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: But with a traditional PPE, the technicians would be wearing a tower anyways. Safety glasses, a pair of gloves. You’re good to go. If you’re doing confined space, work on the inside of a, a, a blade, uh, the biggest value now to this generation of material that are getting qualified.

No VOC non [00:14:00] flammable, uh, no haps. And so it’s a much safer material to actually use in those confined spaces as well as

Allen Hall: well ship

Bret Tollgaard: as well as ship it ships unregulated and so you can ship it. Next day air, which a lot of these customers always end. They do. I know that.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, so next day air, uh, you know, there’s no extra hazmat or dangerous goods shipping for there.

Uh, and same thing with storage conditions. You don’t need a, a flammable cabinet to actually store the material in.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, so it really opens you up for a lot more opportunities.

Allen Hall: I just solves all kinds of problems.

Bret Tollgaard: It, it really does. And that’s the big value that, you know, the UV materials can provide.

Allen Hall: So. I see the putty material and it comes in these little tubes, squeeze tubes. What are these putties used for?

Bret Tollgaard: So right now, the, the existing putty is really just the same exact thickened, uh, resin that’s in the pre-print.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Bret Tollgaard: And it’s worked well. It’s, it’s nice we’re kind of filling some cracks and some faring, some edges and stuff if things need to be feathered in.

But we’ve [00:15:00] been working on this year that we’ll be rolling out very, very soon is a new structural putty. Okay. So we’ll actually have milled fibers in there and components that will make it a much more robust system. And so we’ve been getting more inquiries of, particularly for leading edge rehabilitation.

Where Cat three, cat four, even cat five kind of damage, you need to start filling and profiling before any kind of over laminates can really be done properly. And so we’re working on, uh, rolling that out here very, very soon. Um, and so that will, I think, solve a couple of needs, um, for the wind market. Uh, and then in addition to some new products that we’re rolling out, uh, is gonna be the LEP system that we’re been working on.

Uh, the rain erosion testing showed some pretty good results. But we’re buying some new equipment to make a truly void free, air free system that we’re gonna it, uh, probably submit end of April, beginning of May for the next round, that we expect to have some very, very good, uh, duration and weather ability with,

Allen Hall: because it’s all about speed,

Bret Tollgaard: it’s durability.

Allen Hall: All about e

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And ease of use by someone in the [00:16:00] field. Yeah. Or OEMs on, you know, in the manufacturing plant. Um, there has yet, in my opinion, to be a true winner in the LEP space. That is just the right answer. And so by applying our materials with the really high abrasion resistance that we expect this to have and be as simple to do as it really appeal, stick and cure, um, we think it’s gonna be a bit of a game changer in this industry.

Allen Hall: Well, all the sunrise materials, once they’re cured, are sandal

Bret Tollgaard: correct.

Allen Hall: And I think that’s one of the things about some of the other systems, I always worry about them like, alright, they can do the work today, but tomorrow I have to come back and touch it again. Do I have a problem? Well, and the sun rests stuff is at least my playing around with it has been really easy to use.

It’s, it’s. Uh, things that I had seen maybe 20 years ago in the aerospace market that have they thought about using the material not only [00:17:00] in the factory, but outside the factory. How easy is it to adapt to, how easy to, to paint, to all those little nuances that come up? When you’re out working in the field and trying to do some very difficult work, uh, the sunroom material is ready to go, easy to use and checks all the boxes, all those little nuances, like it’s cold outside, it’s wet outside.

Uh, it’s, it’s hot outside, right? It’s all those things that, that stop ISPs or OEMs from being super efficient. All those parameters start to get washed away. That’s the game changer and the price point is right. How do. People get a hold of you and learn about the sun rose material. Maybe they, you can buy through fiberglass or through composite one.

Mm-hmm. That’s an easy way to do, just get to play with some samples. But when they want to get into some quantity work, they got a lot of blade repair. They know what they’re doing this summer or out in the fall or this winter come wintertime. How do they get [00:18:00] started? What do they do?

Bret Tollgaard: Well, one of the first things to do is they can reach us through our website.

Um, we’re developing a larger and larger library now for how to videos and install procedures, um, generating SOPs that are, you know, semi, uh, industry specific. But at the same time too, it’s a relatively blanket peel and stick patch, whether it’s a wind turbine blade, a corroded tank, or a pressure pipe. Um, and so yeah, www.suns.com Okay, is gonna be a great way to do it.

Uh, we’re actively building more videos to put on, uh, our YouTube channel as well. Um, and so that’s kind of gonna be the best way to reach out, uh, for us. One of the big things that we’re also pushing for, for 26 is to truly get people, uh, in this, in industry, specifically trained and comfortable using the products.

At the end of the day, it’s a composite, it’s a pre impregnated sheet. It’s not difficult, but there are some tips and tricks that really make the, the use case. Uh, the install process a lot easier.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Bret Tollgaard: Uh, and so just making sure that people are, are caught up on the latest and greatest on the training techniques will [00:19:00] go a long way too.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s only as good as the technician that applies it

Bret Tollgaard: e Exactly.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s great. Uh, it’s great all the things you guys are doing, you’re really changing the industry. In a positive way, making repairs faster, uh, more efficient, getting those turbines running. It’s always sad when you see turbines down with something that I know you guys could fix with sun.

Uh, but it does happen, so I, I need the ISPs to reach out and start calling Sun and getting in place because the OEMs are blessing your material. ISPs that are using it are winning contracts. It’s time to make the phone call to Sun Rez. Go to the website, check out all the details there. If you wanna play with your material, get ahold of fiberglass or composite one just.

Order it overnight. It’ll come overnight and you can play with it. And, and once you, once you realize what that material is, you’ll want to call Brett and get started.

Bret Tollgaard: A hundred percent appreciate the time.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Thanks Brett, for being on the podcast. I, I love talking to you guys because you have such cool material.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, no, we’re looking, uh, forward to continuing to innovate, uh, really make this, uh, material [00:20:00] splash in this industry.

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes

Renewable Energy

Infringing on the Rights of Others

Published

1 day ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

I agree with what Ricky Gervais says here; I would only add that there are dozens of ways religion impinges on others.

In my view, the most common is that it impedes our implementing science in things like climate change mitigation. If you believe, as is explicit in the Book of Genesis, that “only God can destroy the Earth,” you have a good excuse to ignore the entirety of climate science.