Our Fillmore crew serves Pana

Older Pana houses need careful prep

Pana grew up where rail lines cross, and many houses near downtown are old wood frame homes with lap siding and deep porches. The main streets carry brick storefronts from the same era. Out past the edge of town, the houses get newer and the farms add steel machine sheds and outbuildings. Each of those surfaces holds paint in its own way, so the prep changes from one job to the next.

Weather in Pana is hard on old wood. Winter freezes and thaws the same boards over and over, and summer humidity keeps moisture in the siding. Paint on the north side of a house stays damp longest, and that is usually where peeling starts. Old brick has its own problem: it is soft, and hard blasting can strip off its outer face. On those walls a power wash is the safer way to clean before any coating goes on.

So before we price a house in Pana, we look at what is on the walls now. Loose and peeling paint has to come off first, because new paint only sticks as well as the layer under it. Water damage inside, from a roof leak or a burst pipe, gets repaired before the room is repainted. We also paint kitchen cabinets and coat concrete garage floors. You will know what prep your house needs before you agree to a price.

• Power wash siding before any paint goes on
• Scrape off loose and peeling paint first
• Interior and exterior painting on older homes
• Water damage repaired before we repaint
• Cabinets painted, garage floors coated

Salt and fertilizer rust out farm equipment

Pana sits in corn and soybean country, and the equipment that works those fields takes a beating. Fertilizer residue eats at bare steel, and it finds every chip in the paint. In winter, trucks on the highways through town pick up road salt and carry it home in the frame rails and wheel wells. Rust starts small under a scratch, then spreads under the paint where nobody sees it.

Painting over that rust does not stop it. The coating has to go onto clean metal, and on a rusted frame or hitch that means blasting it back to bare steel first. Blasting also leaves the metal rough, which gives the primer something to grip. Skip that step and the new paint sits on scale and old rust, and it soon starts lifting off in flakes.

Cold is the other problem here. Most industrial coatings will not cure right on cold steel, and a Pana winter can keep steel cold for weeks. That is why our paint shop in Fillmore is temperature controlled. Trucks and equipment can come into the shop in January and still get a coating that cures properly. Pieces too big to haul get painted where they sit, when the weather allows.

We coat tanks and steel on site

Some jobs in Pana will never fit on a trailer. A storage tank or the steel frame of a building stays where it is, so our crew brings the gear to the site. Out there we prep with abrasive blasting or water jetting, and the job decides which. The rule is the same as in the shop: the surface gets cleaned first, and only then does coating go on.

Water treatment and storage tanks around Pana have their own demands. A lining touches whatever the tank holds all the time, so a thin spot or missed weld seam is where corrosion starts. We apply tank linings and protective coatings, including plural component spray, which mixes the coating at the spray gun. Those coatings build a thick film quickly, and that helps when a tank has to go back into service.

Plant and tank jobs usually come with a written coating spec, and some need a record kept at every step. If your job in Pana has one, we work to it and keep the paperwork it asks for. Robb Spear had a job like that with us, a large piece of equipment with a complex paint and documentation process. The Google review reads: "Very high quality work, very professional, on time and clear communication."

Getting a price in Pana

Call (217) 538-2025 Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, or send us the job details from this page. Tell us what needs blasting or painting, and whether it can come to our Fillmore shop or has to be done on site in Pana. We give free estimates, and you get the price in writing before any work starts.