The Village of Rosemont water tower with its intricate rose design has been an area landmark since its construction in 1982. The colorful tower has been repainted twice, in 1990 and 1998, each time using oil-based enamel paint. When Christopher Burke Engineering and the Village of Rosemont, Illinois, needed to recoat the intricate, multi-color rose design on the 500,000 gallon tower in 2006, they chose fluoropolymer technology from Tnemec to prevent this one-of-a-kind hybrid from fading. “The rose pattern required six different colors, so we had to apply them in two different layers,” reported Kenneth Brend, who was in charge of the project for Jetco, Ltd. “We went around the whole tower once applying half the colors, then came back again and finished the design.”
A flexible containment system was required for most of the work to prevent renegade dust from escaping the jobsite, which was adjacent to a heavily traveled McDonald’s drive-through. “We had to build a canopy from the base of the tower across the drive-through lane of the restaurant,” Brend recalled. “Thirty-five tons of concrete had to be poured at the bases of the 1,600 square foot canopy to prevent movement during high winds.” From the start of the project in June 2006 to its completion in November 2006, the drive-through stayed open without a single report of property damage from overspray.
The tower’s exterior was sandblasted to bare metal in accordance with SSPC-SP6/NACE No. 3 Commercial Blast Cleaning prior to the application of Series 91-H2O Hydro-Zinc, a two-component, moisture-cured, aromatic urethane zinc-rich primer. The primer was spray-applied to the tower’s exterior, followed by an intermediate coat of Series 73 Endura-Shield, an aliphatic acrylic polyurethane, to provide additional film thickness for corrosion resistance.
Brend duplicated the original rose design by sketching it in pencil directly onto the tower using photographs as a reference. He spent several weeks applying the finish coat of Series 700 HydroFlon, a two-component, fluoropolymer polyurethane chosen for its superior long-term gloss and color retention as well as its life expectancy. “We used 9-inch rollers to apply the finish coat wherever there were solid colors, like on the riser,” Brend noted. “For the detailed work, we used 4 inch rollers and dozens of 2-1/2 inch sash brushes.”
“We worked on the tower exterior for 97 days, although we were at the jobsite a total of 165 days,” Brend added. “Wind and rain caused a lot of downtime, but after it was finished, the Rosemont public works department received numerous phone calls from people stating how beautiful it looked. Everybody loved it.”