Light rail vehicles, helicopters, wind turbine components, automotive stamping dies, abatement enclosures, a shopping-mall escalator, and the roof of a 1907 steamship. Boats are the part of this trade people know about. Seventeen years in, they're a small share of the work.

What follows comes from our own job records rather than from anyone's press release. It's here because the question we get most often on a first call is some version of "have you done anything like mine before?"

Aircraft and helicopters

We've wrapped light aircraft for storage while they were out of commission, and helicopters for long-distance moves by transport truck.

The reason this work exists is corrosion. The US Air Force's storage facility at Davis-Monthan — the "Boneyard", around 4,400 airframes — calls corrosion its public enemy number one, and its standard preservation is to wash the airframe thoroughly, drain and treat the systems, seal every opening, and spray a two-layer latex coating that blocks UV and reflects heat. They chose the Arizona desert for a reason. Ontario doesn't offer that option.

A wrapped airframe does the same three jobs by different means: seal the openings, block UV, keep moisture and wildlife out. Road moves add their own list — plexiglass gets protected before anything else touches it, fragile projections get padded, and access is left through a zippered door rather than by cutting the film open. Corrosion inhibitors go inside the wrap where metal needs them.

Rail vehicles

Light rail vehicles have been a steady part of the work — cars built for the TTC, OC Transpo, Vancouver's SkyTrain, Montreal's REM and the Kuala Lumpur network. Toronto's Flexity streetcars were built by Bombardier Transportation at Thunder Bay before Alstom acquired the business in January 2021; Ottawa's Citadis Spirit cars are Alstom's.

New rail vehicles are worth a great deal and travel badly. They typically move by rail flatcar for the long leg, then transfer to a specialized flatbed for the last stretch by road — where they meet stone chips, road salt, grime and weeks of weather. Wrapping is standard enough in the industry that Montreal's REM operator described its first cars arriving from India "wrapped in a white cocoon for extra protection" after twenty-three days at sea and eight hundred kilometres by truck.

The same logic applies to museum pieces. When a heritage trolley collection moved in 2025, the museum boarded the openings and then hired a contractor to shrink wrap both cars for the trip.

Industrial and infrastructure

Wind turbine components at the Nation Rise Wind Farm near Finch, southeast of Ottawa — a 29-turbine Enercon project that reached commercial operation in June 2021. Components for a project that size arrive by vessel and truck over months and wait in a laydown yard before anything goes up. Blades are 75 metres and longer, they sit on purpose-built racks, and while they wait they take UV, temperature cycling and airborne grit.

Discontinued automotive stamping dies for Magna International. Tooling preservation is its own discipline: the industry standard is vapour corrosion inhibitor packaging inside a sealed, dry enclosure, and service-part tooling can need protecting for anywhere from five to twenty years after a model ends production. A die that rusts is not a die you can put back into a press.

And a long list of factory equipment wrapped for shipment across Canada, which is the bread and butter — machinery leaving a plant on a flatbed, sealed before it goes.

Containment and enclosures

Not everything gets wrapped to protect the object. Sometimes the film is there to contain what comes off it. Either way the heat tool comes out, which on most industrial sites means a hot work permit before we start.

We've built scaffold enclosures for asbestos abatement around walls with asbestos-bearing paint, and huts for sandblasting. The method is regulated and specific: a frame sheeted in polyethylene, every seam, penetration and vent sealed, the whole enclosure held under negative pressure by HEPA-filtered units with make-up air drawn through a decontamination airlock, and roughly a full air change every ten minutes. The sheeting is the envelope that makes the rest of it possible.

Also in this category: open wall sections closed off on construction sites when the materials hadn't arrived, and an escalator in a shopping mall wrapped to keep construction dust and debris out of its mechanism. Different hazard, same principle — seal the boundary.

Heritage preservation

The jobs we're proudest of protect things that can't be replaced.

Roof sections and skylights on the SS Keewatin — a 1907 Great Lakes passenger steamship, five years older than Titanic and the last surviving Edwardian passenger liner of her kind. She arrived at the Great Lakes Museum in Kingston in October 2023 after decades at Port McNicoll, and opened to visitors the following May. She sits in our own city now — the kind of job you take at any price.

A full-scale Avro Arrow replica, wrapped while it was in storage near Toronto Pearson. Canada's most famous cancelled aircraft, and a replica that spent years being moved between homes.

The Thousand Islands Railway locomotive at Gananoque, wrapped for the winter months. And restaurant patio furniture, which belongs on a different list entirely but keeps a lot of Ontario restaurants from replacing their chairs every spring.

Heritage work comes with a rule the conservation field is firm about, and it's worth stating because it's where amateur wrapping goes wrong — the same reason a draped cover behaves so differently from a sealed wrap. The Canadian Conservation Institute's guidance on outdoor objects is wary of sealing a historic object inside anything impermeable — trapped moisture against a surface causes exactly the damage the wrap was meant to prevent. A heritage wrap has to breathe. Vent placement stops being a detail and becomes the job.

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