Serving Litchfield from our Fillmore shop

What Litchfield winters do to steel

Litchfield sits beside the interstate, and all winter the plows and trucks coming through spread salt on the roads. That salty spray lands on any steel close to traffic, from trailers to the rails on a loading dock. Then freeze and thaw goes to work. Water gets in under a chip in the paint, freezes, and pushes the coating up a little further each time. By spring, rust has spread under paint that still looks fine from across the lot.

Summer brings the other half of the problem. Central Illinois gets humid, and steel that cools off overnight is wet with dew in the morning. Paint put on over that damp, or over rust that only got a quick wire brushing, has nothing solid to hold onto. It blisters and flakes within a season or two, and the rust keeps growing underneath the whole time. Paint does not stop rust. It only hides it for a while.

So on steel in Litchfield we start with abrasive blasting. Blasting strips the rust and old paint down to clean metal and leaves the surface slightly rough, which gives the primer something to grip. Then the coating goes on before the bare steel has a chance to rust again. If the piece can travel, it can come to our temperature controlled paint shop in Fillmore. Inside, cold and damp weather cannot keep the paint from drying properly.

• Blast rust and old paint down to bare steel
• Power wash or water jet before any coating
• Spray primer and paint at your site
• Paint trucks and equipment in our shop
• Paint house exteriors, interiors and cabinets

Farm fertilizer rusts equipment around Litchfield

Litchfield is surrounded by corn and soybean fields, and the equipment that works them has a hard life. Liquid fertilizer is rough on steel. It collects in the seams of sprayers and fertilizer tanks, and once the paint cracks it starts eating into the metal underneath. Grain trucks and trailers pick up the same kind of damage from road salt every winter. Left alone, a small rust spot on a frame turns into thin metal that has to be cut out.

A piece that can be moved is usually best painted inside. Our paint shop in Fillmore is temperature controlled, so primer and paint dry and harden properly even in January. For a good part of the year, an open lot or an unheated machine shed is too cold for most industrial coatings. Robb Spear had a large equipment job with its own paint and documentation process. He wrote: "Very high quality work, very professional, on time and clear communication."

Bigger jobs stay where they are. Tanks, storage containers and structural steel get blasted and coated on site, because we work in the field as well as in the shop. The prep does not change with the location. The steel gets cleaned down to bare metal first. Then it gets a coating chosen for the job, since the outside of a tank and the inside of one face very different conditions.

Older Litchfield buildings need careful prep

Litchfield grew up around the railroad, and the older part of town still shows it. Downtown has brick storefronts, and the streets around it are lined with wood frame houses, many of them more than a century old. Further out you find newer ranch houses, metal shop buildings and the industrial buildings along the edges of town. Each of those needs a different kind of prep before any paint goes on.

On an old frame house, the problem is usually the layers. Decades of paint pile up on the siding and trim, and the bottom coats slowly lose their grip on the wood. New paint put on top of that peels right off with them. Scraping and sanding the loose paint away, then priming the bare wood, is slow work. It is also the step that decides whether the new paint lasts.

Inside, we paint walls and cabinets and repair water damage. After a leak or a wet spring in the basement, stained drywall or plaster has to be repaired and sealed. Skip the sealing and the stain bleeds straight back through the new paint. Concrete floors in garages and shop buildings can be coated too. The oil and old sealer come off the slab first, so the coating bonds to clean concrete.

Getting a price in Litchfield

Call (217) 538-2025 or send the form on this page. Tell us what needs work and where it sits in Litchfield. Let us know if it can travel to our shop in Fillmore or has to be done on site. Estimates are free, so you know what the job involves before any work starts. Our hours are Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.