At the Dallas Arboretum’s $61 million Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden, visitors receive a bird’s eye view of the treetops from a 200-foot “skywalk” with structural steel walkways protected by a high-performance coating system from Tnemec.
“Dattner Architects, who has been specifying Tnemec for decades, was looking for a durable system that would work on steel and galvanized metal,” recalled Tnemec coating consultant Phil Gonnella of Righter Group, Inc. “These architects consider the coating system in a project’s embryonic stages and really sweat the details.”
While Gonnella worked closely with the architectural firm based in New York, the Dallas-based general contractor and painting contractor relied heavily on The Barry Group in Texas and coating consultant Justin Taute, who is now with NexGen Coating Resources in Tennessee.
“The project required considerable coordination among agencies spread across a wide geographic area,” according to Taute. “The inter-agency cooperation between The Righter Group in the Northeast and The Barry Group in the Southwest was very instrumental in getting this project completed.”
Non-galvanized ferrous metal was abrasive-cleaned in accordance with SSPC-SP Commercial Blast Cleaning and shop-primed with Series 90-97 Tneme-Zinc, a two-component, zinc-rich urethane primer spray-applied at 2.5 to 3.5 mils dry film thickness (DFT).
Field Touch-up consisted of Series 90-97 applied over abraded or chipped surfaces, followed by an intermediate coat of Series 66 Hi-Build Epoxoline, a polyamide epoxy, at 4.0 to 6.0 mils DFT. A finish coat of Series 73 Endura-Shield, an aliphatic acrylic urethane was field-applied at 2.0 to 3.0 mils DFT. All field coatings were brush and roller applied.
Galvanized ferrous metal received a first coat of Series 66 and a finish coat of Series 73 Endura-Shield.
A decorative metal archway with a leaf pattern was coated with Series 1078 Fluoronar Metallic, a high-solids fluoropolymer coating that provides a durable, UV resistant metallic finish.
Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden covers eight acres and features 150 displays and activities that include oversized plants and insects, and an energy island. The Dallas Arboretum joins a list of more than 100 similar children’s gardens around the country, including the New York Botanical Garden, the Denver Botanic Garden, and the Morton Arboretum near Chicago.