ICRI Concrete Surface Prep Seminar at Our Shop

Back in early March, we cleared out our shop in Stockton, set up the chairs, fired up the heaters, and hosted around forty folks from across the region for an event I’d been looking forward to for months: the Iowa/Illinois ICRI Chapter’s Concrete Surface Preparation Seminar.

If you’re not familiar, ICRI, the International Concrete Repair Institute, is the industry body that sets the standards for how concrete repair work is actually done. I serve as Vice President of our Iowa/Illinois Chapter, and one of the reasons I took the role was to help bring this kind of training closer to home. The Midwest has plenty of talented contractors. What it sometimes lacks is the chance to get them all in one room with the engineers, chemists, and equipment manufacturers whose products we rely on every day.

Matt Hansen from Euclid Chemical led the classroom portion on concrete surface profiles, what CSP 1 through CSP 10 actually mean, when each one is required by spec, and how to consistently produce them in the field. After lunch we moved out onto the shop floor, where Niagara Machine, DeWalt, Hilti, Acme Tools, SpongeJet, and Blastpro had their grinders, scarifiers, shot blasters, and dust extraction systems set up and ready to run. Watching contractors who normally compete on the next bid stand shoulder to shoulder, asking each other questions about technique, that’s exactly what makes events like this work.

Big thanks to Matt and Euclid for the educational content, and to all the vendor partners who hauled equipment in and ran demos all day. Huge thanks also to my fellow Iowa/Illinois ICRI officers and directors, who put in a ton of work behind the scenes prepping this event. And to our TNT crew, who got the shop cleaned out, set up, heated, and ready to host, you turned a working warehouse into a real venue and made the whole thing possible. We’ll be doing more of these, and I hope to see even more of you at the next one.

- Josh