LEISURE & SPORTING VENUES LEARNING THE HARD WAY
Mike Hamer, National Technical Sales Manager for Pallmann, talks candidly about his experiences as a contractor when it came to laying sports flooring in challenging circumstances.
Sometimes, when you have done the same piece of work time after time, complacency kicks in, or maybe you miss a vital bit of information, and it can make the difference between profitable success and expensive failure.
Before joining PALLMANN, when I was a contractor, my company had a long- term contract to scrub off, re-key and apply two coats of lacquer as a ‘top up’ operation in four local sports centres, each around 800m2 line marked.
and each fully
It was a useful contract, as it was always carried out the week before Christmas to allow for the coating to fully cure over the break. The work was quite lucrative and the money was definitely handy in a cash-strapped January! We had the contract for over 10 years, and every year we employed the same technique which worked without fail.
Then, one year, I had a call from one of my lads: “You had better get over here boss…the lacquers separating!” I guess that we have all had that awful feeling in the pit of our stomachs, when you know that it isn’t good news. That day, I had that feeling too.
Arriving at the sports centre I was faced with a normal looking coating, drying nicely across most of the floor, but the lacquer in five parallel lines across the
I guess that we have all had that awful feeling in the pit of our stomachs, when you know that this
isn’t good news. That day, I had that feeling too.
On inspection, this seating rolled out to about halfway up the hall on five sets of tracks. After speaking to the engineer, he confirmed that he had liberally applied graphite grease to the wheels and then pulled the seating units to full extension, just to check them.
So the mystery was solved, but the net result was that a scrub and re-seal job became a full sand, re-mark, and re-coat job which cost me five times the cost of
floor and up to about halfway up the sports hall was separating and drying in a very odd way.
We questioned the sports centre manager thoroughly, but she had no recollection of anything out of the ordinary being applied to the floor; the only thing that had happened recently was that the engineer had been in to service the pull out audience seating.
the original work and incurred a severe dent to my company’s reputation.
Similarly, we were also once asked to over-coat a badly worn dance studio and this time the water-based lacquer failed across the whole floor. It transpired that the health club had a long-term problem with complaints over slips and when conventional degreasants hadn’t worked, they had used the sort of stuff that you use on your car engines! The stuff had soaked in to the exposed wood, dried and, of course, our water-based lacquer re- activated it and failed to connect.
So when PALLMANN first launched PALL-X 350, a two-component polyurethane primer, it reminded me of my problem with this job site. It is always best to test. Of course, it probably wouldn’t work over graphite grease but it does work in the vast majority of cases. It is a product that takes most of the risk out of the potentially lucrative over-coating market. It is easy, very quick and inexpensive to apply and gives a great connection for subsequent re-coating with PALLMANN water-based lacquer within the hour.
www.pallmann.co.uk
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