Case History: Papé Machinery

Papé Machinery is one of the west’s largest construction and forestry equipment suppliers and has been around for almost seventy years. One of their dealers and service centers in Tacoma, WA was having problems with the concrete floors in their service bays. The floors were being badly damaged from the heavy equipment moving in and out, including large machinery having steel tracks and chains that provide traction in the mud and snow. These steel treads and chains in addition to the heavy weight of the vehicles were severely gouging and damaging the concrete. Darrin Ishaug, the Service Manager of Papé, contacted Marty Hogan of Dunkin and Bush, an International Coatings Certified Contractor, to see if they could come up with a solution to the problem.

Dunkin & Bush had installed International Coating’s ICO Floor 51 system at Coors Brewery in Virginia with great success. They knew ICO Floor 51 was a tough and resilient material and thought International Coatings could help customize it so that could withstand the conditions at Papé Machinery. Marty and ICO representative Tim Rayburn devised a system that used the ICO Floor 51 at a ¼” thickness but in the areas where the heavy steel tracks would contact the floor they combined a steel filler with the usual ICO Fill hand trowelled sand to make the system even more abrasion resistant

A test patch of ICO Floor 51 with the steel filler was put down at ¼” in one of the service bays. It was heavily abused for two-months and held up great with no problems. Papé was impressed enough with the systems toughness and durability and decided to have it installed in the rest of the facility.

Dunkin & Busch installed # sq/ft of ¼” topping, in three separate four day periods so some of the bays could remain operational while they were doing the installation. They first thoroughly washed the concrete with a citrus-based cleaner to remove any oil and fluids from the concrete. They then blast-tracked the concrete to obtain a clean, sound, abraded surface for the epoxy to bond with. They also routed out any cracks and pre-filled some of the deeper holes and more severely spalled areas with the ICO Floor 51.

To date Papé Machinery has been extremely impressed with the performance of the floor and it’s ability to withstand the abrasion and impact from the heavy machinery.