Cathedral Green Lamp-posts
New lamp-posts installed on Exeter Cathedral Green got some paint damaged in the process. The coating on them is a two-pack polyurethane that meets Highway Agency specifications, and is principally designed to be sprayed. Obviously, spraying a coating like this in a popular open space amongst the public was not going to be an option, so the paint was going to have to be applied with brush and/or roller.
For starters, it’s not an easy site. The wind whistles round the Cathedral, and when the sun comes out it heats up the dark grey lamp-posts making the paint-solvent flash-off even faster.
Before I got to the job, two other painting firms had been to the job and had a go and to be fair, putting any paint on whilst up a ladder, in these conditions was never going to be easy. Especially a sticky fast-drying-solvent type of coating like this one. One of the previous painters had used foam-rollers to apply the paint, but the resulting stipple was not acceptable to the client and there was absolutely no possibility of enough time to lay-off roller marks with a brush before the solvent evaporated, so I was convinced it would have to be done by brush only.
I was required to do a test lamp-post to see how I got on. Luckily I was using my ‘lighting-collar’. Purchased for another job, and though I thought it horrifically expensive at the time, it has since proved very useful.
Thinning the coating by 7%, and using a brand new, quality bristle brush, I managed to get some sort of flowing coat on and did do a pretty good job even though I say so myself. But I could see it was not going to be good enough, mainly because you just couldn’t get up and down the ladder fast enough to keep a wet-edge going with the fast drying solvent.
Under these conditions, it was decided to go with a slightly lower spec single-pack urethane-modified coating that could be applied by brush more easily. The job was completed and lampposts looked good as new.
Published by: Colin Taylor on: February 23rd 2016
