Project Profile: A Big Project From Older Days!

Donald (dec) and Douglas Borthwick 82yrs old

– A. Borthwick and Sons

In 1968 we got a phonecall to come out and look at a large floor in Yarraville. The Textile Industry Union didn’t want the employees standing on hard concrete floors all day, and had the carpenters install Brushbox strip flooring throughout, to be softer underfoot. But they wanted us to sand and polish it all for them.

It was the Bradmill Woolstore in Yarraville – in total across several buildings approximately 56,000m2/ 602,778sqft/14 acres.

We had to start works over the Christmas Holiday period – with a crew of 10 we began the full sand and polish that was completed in around three months.

The coating we used was Spartan 7008 (Wattyl) in steel
44 gallon drums we dipped our buckets into. Three coats.

We used our 12inch McPherson drum sanders, with Behr-Manning (Norton) sandpaper, and our Canterbury buffers to cut back between coats.

Then we recoated the lot again in the following two years around Christmas.