Try to imagine .0015 inches, it’s not easy to visualize. Now, rip one of the hairs off of your head and that’s about half of the .0015 inches, which is the allowable variance of a concrete floor that one contractor is working on right now.
Lodge Manufacturing, the company that sells the extremely popular Lodge cost iron cookware, is building a 212,000 square foot distribution center in Marion County, TN that will consolidate all of its 4 current warehouses into one building. The new warehouse will be equipped with wire guided lift trucks that will stack and retrieve the cast iron products on the shelves. As pallets of cast iron products can way in the tons, the concrete floor beneath the trucks had to be extremely flat, reported the Times Free Press.
Morgan Construction Co. and Eldridge Concrete Construction took on the challenge of placing the concrete floor, which spanned almost 4 football fields in length (1,200 feet), with a variance of only .0015 inches.
That’s incredibly precise and may be the flattest concrete floor in the world, according to Walter Ford, who is the vice president of operations for Morgan Construction. "We worked really hard to maintain ideal conditions with temperature, lighting and the concrete mix to get the flattest floor imaginable," Ford said in a statement.
Environmental conditions can play a huge role in how the concrete cures, so everything had to be perfectly planned in order to achieve the results. Subgrade conditions will undoubtedly play a future factor in whether or not the floor will continue to stay as flat as it is, especially when the weight of the cast iron is placed on the floor. Regardless of the final outcome, placing the concrete with that small of a variance is an extremely impressive achievement.
Full story: Lodge Manufacturing constructs biggest building in Marion County [photos] | Times Free Press
