The Farrow Story

The Farrow System® History

In 1988, Nigel Farrow, inventor of The Farrow System®, set out on a journey of discovery. Farrow, the son of an English Dairy farmer, had learned to sail as a boy. As an adult, he had the opportunity to crew aboard a sailing ship owned by his employer, Lloyd’s Underwriting. While involved in the winter maintenance of the vessel, Farrow decided there must be a better way to clean anti-fouling coatings from boat hulls. Over the next ten years, Farrow’s experiments hit many dead ends. Scraping took too much time and labor, and chemical stripping was slow, dangerous and created disposal problems. Media blasting looked promising, but produced clouds of contaminated dust and damaged most surfaces. Then, in the late 1990’s, Farrow tried adding heat to his process.

Suddenly, everything started to work. Working with a scientist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, Farrow proved that introducing heat added energy and created free flow in his wet abrasive system. Free flow through fluidisation creates the optimum distribution of media within the carrier fluid (water).  Injecting heat causes the particles to be suspended in the vapor at the nozzle creating a more even and consistent pattern when cleaning and creating a profile for paint. Farrow had discovered one of the first of many keys to fast, safe, and economical cleaning. He patented his first process worldwide in 1998, and The Farrow System® was born.  Since then, the The Farrow System® has become synonymous with wet abrasive slurry blasting.
The future of Farrow is through finding additional ways to create FREE FLOW and currently has another breakthrough invention which can improve any blasting system dry, slurry or ice and even power washing.  The benefits of FARROW FLOW harness properties well known in fluid dynamics.  The effect is beneficial to not only the various blasting markets but to many new markets including gas, marine, industrial, aviation, medical and more.