- Specification for the Paint on the Metal Canopy

Hello, everyone, my name is Ron Brinkman. I'm an architectural designer with Leo A Daly. Today I'm gonna be talking about an elementary school remodel here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Project specifications are very unique in our industry. The really-- The opportunity for us to really hone in and refine and legally define what we're actually intending to use in the building, and they can tend to show a lot of information, which is the kind of primary goal, is to incorporate all the information that you can't possibly incorporate on a drawing sheet, nor would that be terribly beneficial to a contractor, seeing all of the information in one place.

It's good to have it is multiple places and formats, on a drawing sheet or in a specification. So, the example here I'm gonna show you on the right is a specification, very specifically for the paint on this metal canopy. Now, it sounds very uninteresting, but it's actually a really kind of fascinating spec, and kind of fascinating situation because of the amount of effort that we had to go through to make this very appropriate and right paint system for this project.

So, there's a couple things at play that we knew about going into this. First off, it's not actually what most people would consider a traditional paint. It's actually a high-performance coating, which means there's three or four layers of material that are applied to the finishes of this, this is just steel, just red steel, applied to the finishes of this to make it really water-tight and rust-resistant, primary goal of which being to have it weather with very little maintenance needed over the seasons.

It's a school, there's lots of maintenance. They have lots of other priorities to maintain, more critical areas of the building, so we don't want them to worry about this hopefully really minimalist canopy. So, what makes this spec so interesting is that it's not a typical spec that you would see, or that you would use, in a lot of applications.

Most high-performance coatings that you would use aren't necessarily in reference to steel when we're making a building. It's a lot more common in bridgework and things where there's a lot more exposed steel outside, so for this particular spec, this is a three-part spec, first part being kind of the fee of conditions, existing conditions, and kind of installation requirements for the product. The second part being information about the product itself. This particular product we used a basis of design strategy, which means we did a lot of research on a lot of different products and we picked, as our basis of design, one very specific product, very specific series of products, actually.

It's like a three-part application process, so it's a very, very specific product, and then with that it is a public school, so we include comparable alternates as well so that contractors certainly aren't handcuffed to that particular product, but it is the product that we wanted, and we did have a lot of validity and research into trying to get them to use that product, all of which we defined in this spec, very hopefully clearly, so that we would get that product installed.

And then this last part, this third part is all about execution and the means by which we required contracting teams to apply and install this particular paint finish, high-performance coating finish. Again, this is kind of a unique thing.

Most paints are applied in the field, so you put it, you install it in place, then you paint it with spray paint or whatever other system you're gonna use. This particular one was all factory applied, so they literally painted everything like you would an automobile or a car in the factory, and then with a very large crane brought it off a truck and placed it in place when it was all finished and done. The benefit and the reason we showed that in our spec was that we were concerned that at all the welded joints it would cause some cracking of the normal finish and rusting, ultimately, which that's kind of our number one enemy at this site in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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