INFRASTRUCTURE INSIGHTS Winter 2022 | Vol. 4 | No. 3 has seen, there are little cost savings, and in some cases, more time and money are needed to perform the rework than it would have been to perform the painting in the field instead of the shop. Owners should evaluate specific details of their projects to determine what type of coating application will provide the best quality and cost for their situation. While painting all three coats of paint in the shop might be a new trend, owners must ensure that specifications and in -spection procedures provide for a coating system that will provide the best possible protection for their structures. Owners must ensure that no matter what method of painting is done that they provide for some of the following: • Appearance of the final product • Repair procedures for damaged coatings • Faying surfaces • Good specification • Good inspection • Good painting contractor . II Charles (Charlie) S. Brown is the deputy director of coatings at Greenman-Pedersen, Inc., Columbia, Maryland, USA. He has more than 37 years of experience in the coatings industry as an industrial hygienist performing safety audits, hazard assessments, air monitoring, as well as teaching safety courses for contractors, state agencies, and the federal govern-ment. Brown was the operations manager for an industrial painting contractor in Maryland for 14 years. He is an AMPP instructor for the C3 and C5 courses and is a past SSPC chairman for the Painting Contractor Certification Program Advisory Committee. He is the chair for the AMPP Standards Committee (SC )24: Environ-mental Health & Safety/Regulatory and is a member of SC 25: Accreditation. Brown is a member of the AASHTO TSP2 National Bridge Preservation Partnership Coatings Group and a member of the AASHTO Domestic Scan 15-03 Successful Preser-vation Practices for Steel Bridge Coatings. He is an AMPP Senior Certified Coatings Inspector with Bridge Certification and an AMPP Certified Protective Coatings Spe -cialist. He is a member of AMPP. This article was originally published in Materials Performance . Republished with permission FIGURE 5. Fascia not repainted but only touched up. etc.) were coated with all three coats of paint and once the plates were bolted to the faying surfaces, failures started to occur on all the connection faces (Fig-ure 4). Also, the faying surfaces did not meet slip critical requirements. In addition to these problems, many areas of the steel had issues with damaged coatings throughout the bridge that needed to be touched up. As this bridge was not a road over road, the facias were not repainted due to cost constraints (Figure 5). The specification could have been writ -ten in several different ways to alleviate the problem with faying surfaces and reduce the cost to the state, but most importantly, the inspection in the shop did not notice this problem. The initial speci-fication had all three coats of paint on all steel and did not address faying surfac-es. This was not questioned by the paint inspector or the fabricating shop. The additional costs associated with re-moving the splice plates and connections, cleaning them down to bare metal, apply-ing a zinc primer to make the connections slip critical compliant, then reattaching them, painting intermediate and finish coats, as well as touch up throughout the bridge, added approximately $150,000 to the cost of this project. of a dual bridge on I-70 over MD 63. This contract required, among other things, to replace the existing structural steel for the bridge and called for all new steel to have all three coats of paint applied in the shop with inspection performed at the shop. After having problems with the previous job, the state wanted to have all the steel primed only. When the fabricator was con-tacted, they had already painted the steel. The fabricator, being alerted to the previ-ous problem, only painted the zinc primer to the faying surfaces and painted the rest of the steel with all three coats of paint. This job had problems with damaged coatings throughout the bridge. Bolt patterns and diaphragm connections were only primed, and the fascia surfaces needed to be re-coated due to damage during construction. In the end, the cost for this work ranged from $2.50 to $3 per square foot. When added to the overall cost, it worked out to be about the same as painting in the field. However, more traffic control was needed to fix the damaged coatings and it extended the job by approximately two weeks—the same amount of time it would have taken to do all the field painting. Conclusions Case 2 In June of 2014, another project in Mary-land was advertised for the replacement 6 Owners and specification writers using a three-coat system in the shop thinking it might save money need to re-evaluate the proposed cost savings. As this author
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