CONCRETE REPAIR CONTINUED anchor something in concrete, you want [the repair product] to expand so it fills the void and locks the product in place.” DAVE FULLER, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL CONCRETE REPAIR INSTITUTE “Educate yourself. I was in the flooring and coatings industry for 10-15 years and then I came into what was BASF. I went to their concrete one-on-one training, and even though I had been coding concrete for most of my career, I couldn’t believe what I didn’t know. I asked myself, ‘Why haven’t I taken a course like this before?’ There’s so much out there now. There’s training in organizations like ICRI and ACI. And a lot of it is free. Before you can repair concrete, you have to understand concrete. You have to understand what goes into concrete, why it behaves the
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jump headfirst into concrete repair; jump headfirst into concrete. Second, don’t just look at the symptoms. You have to find out why your concrete is deteriorating and then you can come up with a solution."
Dave Fuller, Technical Director, International Concrete Repair Institute International Concrete Repair Institute
way it does, why does it crack in this area and not that, why use reinforcement in the first place, and why reinforcement can be detrimental because of corrosion. You have to understand all that before you can understand why we do certain things in the repair industry. Don’t just
JULY/AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2022
PETE BARLOW, CHAIRMAN OF ACI 546 REPAIR COMMITTEE, VP OF CONTECH SERVICES INC. “The most important thing is to try to understand what the problem is and is there a problem. A project with a broken posted tensioning cable may or may not need repair. There could be enough redundancy in the design that losing one cable doesn't matter. But that's an engineer’s call and not typically a contractor’s call. Maybe you don't really have a problem. It's a decision that should be made collaboratively between the consultant, a contractor, and the owner—the owner is ultimately going to pay for the repair.
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