Monuments are man’s way to honor and remember important events, places and people in history. Churches, memorials, monoliths, arches, columns, and statues become iconic landmarks that stand for the things that mankind values.
Many such monuments are old structures from the past. As such, their restoration is often a challenge to present-day restorers. For one, many such monuments no longer have any documents or materials of their original construction, much less any history of any maintenance done to them. Since they are old, they are often in bad condition and in varying degrees of deterioration.
Corrosion resistant coatings contractors, in particular, find the coating restoration job to be problem-mired, because of the lack of history about the coatings previously applied. The very materials used originally by the monument builders may not be available. The eons of time that passed between construction and present-day restoration may have wrought much corrosive damage to the structure, but corrosion resistant coatings constructors do not often know how much the extent of corrosion damage is.
To solve this problem of the unknown, much research has to be done prior to actual corrosion resistant coatings application. If the original formula is not available, restorers have to painstakingly read archive documents, or look at old photos, or run a materials testing in a laboratory to determine the material content. It is important to know the property of the materials used in the monument, so that it can be determined how the monument aged through time, and how vulnerable it is to corrosion. Any deep-seated or recent corrosion need to be detected and quantified, and should be removed or treated appropriately.
Only a proper analysis of the monument’s surface and base materials can aid in determining the kind of corrosion resistant coatings products to use for the monument’s restoration.
