Sydney Showground is home to a range of sporting and entertainment events, with those at night illuminated by all eight of the hulking light towers standing above the stadium.

The Royal Agriculture Society of New South Wales reached out to our local Sydney team to see if our painting experts had the expertise to manage a repaint to the ground’s light towers.

The challenge

The key difficulty with a repaint at this scale is access. Ropes access is the only viable method to conquer heights that exceed 70m, however, there is a multitude of challenges that come with abseiling at such dizzying heights. With minimal protection from the elements, turbulent winds are prevalent, which creates an issue in descending the structures as well as applying the paint. The towers’ heights meant that the ascent back to the drop-point could take up to 15 minutes and would involve stairs.

Telecommunications antennas from three telco providers and the government are positioned atop one of the light towers. To safely be able to execute the repaint, all antennas needed to be suspended. Additionally, rust presented on several towers, which required treatment before the decorative coatings could be applied.

Solution

Our attention to detail in the quoting phase created confidence in the customer that our operations team could tackle a repaint of this magnitude. We put forward a confident team of operatives feverish to take on the challenge. One tower at a time, our abseil experts descended from the light towers. Significant rust needed to be grinded back, before being primed ahead of finishing coatings. We applied Dulux Durebild STE and Weathermax HBR to provide a long-life coating system for the towers.

When winds exceeded a given level, our project manager deemed it unsafe to descend from the towers. We utilised an ascender to expedite the ascent back to the top of the towers, although given the angle of some of the towers this was ineffective.

The nature of the work required constant communication with the customer. If the stadium was being utilised, we were not able to be on-site. We estimated that four weeks would be required to repaint the light tower with the telecom’s infrastructure, however, we were only granted three weeks to complete this section of the project. We employed additional operatives to overcome this hurdle and were able to meet this deadline.

Results

Despite the degree of difficulty associated with this repaint, our ropes access experts delivered an operationally excellent outcome for the Royal Agricultural Society NSW. We used a thickness gauge on the final product to highlight that our application matched the painting supplier's specification. This provided the customer with proof of quality and validates the warranty.