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Tour de Chance
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Bike Paint On The Ceiling?
“We wanted the ceiling color to be neutral and we wanted light to bounce around,” says Eric Lynn, Design Department manager for Print, Product Graphic, and Interactive Design at Trek Bicycles. “We wanted a metallic feel to it and none of the currently available coatings had that characteristic.”
The Trek team thought about the company that develops the colors and coatings for their bikes and called Terry Welch, president and chemist at Prime Coatings in Pewaukee, WI.
“We have been making coatings for Trek for 18 years,” says Welch. “We have hundreds of colors and we work closely with marketing to develop color schemes. We got a call from Dick Moran, Trek’s head of marketing. He asked us about painting the building addition a new color — and it couldn’t be battleship gray.”
Prime Coatings’ core business is coatings for original equipment manufacturers (OEM) products such as bicycles, motorcycles, and golf clubs — not for 40,000 square feet of a commercial building.
Moran told Welch that the Trek employees would be working nearby while the painting was being done so they needed an odorless coating. Prime Coatings stepped up to the challenge.
“We tried two-component polyurethane, but it became apparent that the odor was going to be prohibitive,” Welch says. “It was what the contractor specified, but we moved to the water-bornes. Our Aqualac product is a modified acrylic with almost no odor.”
“It’s a dry fall coating.” He continues, “Anything that didn’t get the ceiling had to be dry when it fell. There is no pot-life to this material and from the painter’s point of view, they love this one-component product, because it dries fast and has relatively no odor. It also has outstanding UV protection.”
Coatings contractor Ash was impressed by Prime Coatings’ quick turnaround once a decision was made on the Aqualac product. “We had some pigment air-freighted overnight and put test batches on the ceiling. By Prime Coatings’ third try, they had it.”
Next, Porta-Painting helped Prime Coatings achieve the necessary viscosity for spraying by testing samples with their Graco Model 1095 electric airless sprayers, which Welch says took about two weeks. He explains that when adding aluminum pigments to water for the metallic look, coating stability becomes a concern.
“We probably put a dozen different samples through our equipment,” says Ash. “What we did was a little on-the-job-training class. We worked on an area that would be covered up. Our foreman figured out tip sizes and pressure capacities, ultimately settling on a No. 313-sized tip.”
The Trek project served as a test bed for bringing together custom and conventional products into the same environment. “They all demonstrated to us what could be done,” says Trek’s Lynn. “Obviously, it’s different to paint a ceiling than it is to paint a bike. Terry [Welch] did a quick turnaround for us with not much notice. He came in, did a consultation, and we showed him some colors from our bike models that we liked. When we finally decided, he had production quantity for the ceiling delivered within five or six days.” Then he continued the teamwork by working closely with the coatings contractor to make sure that the coating stuck to the ceiling.
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By Michelle Gardner
Cooperative efforts allow a seasoned coatings contractor to try out innovative paints from another side of the industry.
Sometimes, coatings contractors have to think outside the paint pail when satisfying a customer’s requests. When Porta-Painting, Inc. of Walworth, Wisconsin bid the job of painting the walls and ceilings of Trek Bicycles’ new product design center in Waterloo, Wisconsin, they found out that the project required a different approach, and an unconventional coating, to achieve the desired results.
“We bid the job to paint the walls and ceiling,” recalls Bruce Ash, co-owner of Porta-Painting. “Trek has a unique lobby that has a high barrel vault ceiling made out of acoustical metal deck, a perforated metal that absorbs sound. They didn’t want a finish that everyone else had, but they didn’t really know what they wanted. Somebody suggested a metallic so we went to different paint companies and tried some different paint products. But nothing seemed to be the answer.”
Ash knew of some metallic products but nothing that had been used on this large of a project.
The “project” is a 42,000 square foot addition to the current Trek building that houses the Product, Engineering, and Marketing Groups, as well as other support groups. Along with the dozens of models of production bikes, Trek makes the bicycles used by seven-time Tour de France champion, Lance Armstrong.
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin-based Oliver Construction was the general contractor for the construction of the new lobby area and open office area. The sub-contracted coatings work would include the metal deck ceiling structure, steel trusses, conduit ventilation tubing, as well as some of the detailing on the pillars — a variety of materials. Also, the coatings contractor would be painting over pre-primed steel as well as galvanized steel on the tubing. After an exhaustive search for the right coating (see sidebar) the Porta-Painting crew was ready to finally begin painting.
One Coat Does It
Ash describes the prepping process stating, “To begin, we used compressed air to blow off dust.” He continues, “Galvanized pipe and sprinkler pipe were cleaned with Great Lakes Laboratories No Rinse Prepaint Cleaner applied with sponges and white cotton rags. On ductwork, we’d spray it on with the Graco airless and wipe down with rags.”
Prime Coatings’ Aqualac 32 Series — a water-based, acrylic emulsion with anti-corrosion properties — has unlimited pot life, no flash point, goes on in one coat and dries in 20 to 30 minutes at 60ºF to 70ºF. The Trek office addition’s winning color is called Platinum and is packaged in 5-gallon pails and 55-gallon drums.
Armed with their airless sprayers, the Porta-Painting crew with three spraying and one ground person, set out to test their mettle — and Prime Coatings metal paint — on the variety of substrates in the new addition. Ash says they would mainly work with two people in a bay and use a 2- to 3-mil thickness cross-hatch pattern for the coating.
“We had to be careful. If we applied it heavier than 3 mils WFT, it started to sag because the metallic makes it a heavier coating,” Ash explains. “We ended up going with a smaller tip to limit the amount of paint getting applied.”
According to Ash, the project took 500 gallons and ended up with about 125 square feet to the gallon. And, because they were in on the ground floor so to speak with the testing of this coating, the coating was developed around the type of equipment Porta-Painting would be using on this project, so no special equipment components were needed.
Safety Considerations
Workers wore coveralls, safety glasses, and Willson charcoal filter half-mask respirators while spraying the whole project. When the crew worked on the vaulted ceiling, they needed to rent an articulated electric boom because for safety reasons, they couldn’t run any propane or diesel machines inside the building. Porta-Painting had its own MEC Scissor Lift for other work inside the building. When working on the boom, the crew wore Miller five-point safety harnesses.
As for the Trek employees, “We were sealed off in a separate part of the building while the work was being done. That area had not yet been linked to the new addition,” says Lynn.
The Porta-Painting crew had to work around the schedules of Oliver Construction, as well as the other trades involved in the project.
“We didn’t want to paint the ceiling with the chance of drywall dust getting into the fresh paint,” says Ash who gives high praise to Oliver’s field superintendent, Barry Stephan. “He coordinated weekly meetings to keep us informed as to when we could get in there,” Ash recalls. “We’d stay in touch to keep on track. He’s a very good planner.”
Porta-Painting’s workdays were eight-hour shifts or longer that occurred mostly during the day, although they did a couple of areas at night to make life easier for others. As people could be moved to the new addition, Porta-Painting would move along as well until it was all completed.
Teamwork Makes Perfect
The lengthy decision process on color and coating pushed the project’s timing into near-critical mode for the painters. “We lost probably a month and a half of time before they decided on what coating they wanted,” says Ash.
“For the initial phase of the project, the main overriding issue was that the original coatings were not satisfactory,” says Lynn. “By that time, the contractor was on a tight schedule for completion. We had maybe 10 days to get painting completed.”
“Everyone was there when we were applying the samples,” recalls Ash, “and they could ask questions in their own language. While we were painting, the Trek representative could ask a question or make a comment to us or to the general contractor or to the Prime Coatings person and there was no miscommunication. It sped up the process so much and really helped alleviate problems.”
Just as Trek’s most famous client, Lance Armstrong, needs a team to support his winning efforts, this coatings project also required the dedication and hard work of a team — owners, chemist, general contractor, and coatings crew — in order to successfully think outside of the paint pail.
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