painting tunnel walls

Was in the process of painting our old tunnel walls. It is 10 year old epoxy. Worked with the local Shermin Williams guy to get their recommendation on things. I just wanted to see if any of you guys had any tips. Obviuosly we don't want to be down longer than we need to.... I was thinking of heating (cooking the walls) the tunnel to get the moisture down, but how long before washing? Basically I was looking for some mistakes you have made so I could avoid them?

My tip- don't paint :)

My first wash was painted with latex paint but had been shut down a while so the walls were completely dried out so it worked OK . I think that is the key to successful coating. If you can't wait, I'd consider other options such as extrutech paneling or FRP.

We decided to paint one of our tunnels about a year and a half ago. We pressure washed the entire tunnel on a Sunday. The following Sunday we painted the walls with a very expensive two-part epoxy. The paint looked great for about 6 months. It began to crack, and then it started peeling off in sheets. We are now going to cover the walls with vinyl. I hope your experience is better than ours. GOOD LUCK

We painted a tunnel wall once and will never do it again. We ended up covering it with extrutech about 6 months later. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but we did not have a good experience with it.

We painted once with Pool paint thinking it would work, It made it ten time worse...all that hard work was covered up 10 months later iwth FRP board..save time and energy now and layer it with some sort of washable wall paneling...my advive! not the only solution...good luck

painting tunnel walls is a fool's errand. No matter what you use it will not stand up long term to the constant exposure of chemicals and water, not to mention when you try to clean them and especially if you employ reclaim water in the wash area.

Eight years ago, we put up panels of smooth, gel coated frp. In that time we've used Zep's zepcorex to clean them with ( an acid base) and they still loook like the day we put them in. You can see alittle dirt just on the edges of the seems between panels, but otherwise they look great and clean up easy. Just make sure its the smooth, gel coated kind as they will not hold dirt like the standard , orange peel, frp.

In our case we also had to build a studd wall down the driver's side of the tunnel to cover up the old customer walkway (we were full service). Unfortunately, we chose galvanized studds and they have not taken well, especially as the zepcorex has penetrated the plastic anchors and worked its way to the galvanized studd. You can guess the rest. This eyar we will be replacing the studd wall with UHMW studds and will also put epoxy on the sudds as we anchors them in to eliminate this problem.

Above all else, don't paint. its not worth the time or the paint unless you plan on doing it every 2-3 years, becuase no matter what you use it will simply not hold up.