Oslo Spektrum - the floor in focus
The Oslo Spektrum was opened to the public in December 1990 and was awarded with the city of Oslo architectural prize in 2004. The reason for building this event arena was the need in the city of Oslo to have a common platform that could house everything from important exhibitions to international music arrangements. That idea has proved to work well and the Spektrum is now a forum for widely different events like the TV broadcasted Noble prize concert or the Disney on Ice show. Since the opening approximately 5 million visitors have visited the premises in connection to different events.
With so many changing arrangements the traffic during assembling and dismantling periods is very intense and frequent, you often drive with big trucks straight on to the floor, besides that you have the normal personel traffic during events and on a daily basis. To protect the floors from damage a clear epoxy coating was applied, but created other problems instead. Black tyre marks from transports and epoxy flaking of from the floor surface made it very difficult to clean. A change was needed.
At a meeting with a facility managment consultant the Spektrum managment were made aware of the HTC Superfloor™ concept as a possible solution to the problem. This lead them to take contact with the HTC partner in Norway, Normann Olsen A/S. A small test surface was ground and soon they were convinced that this was an excellent solution for the floors. The grinding project started 2004 and was finished during 2005.
The floor takes shape
Betotec AS, with owner Leif Lystad in lead, was chosen as contractor to grind and polish the floor. You could say that the floor in the Oslo Spektrum is divided into two different sections and concrete quality, the transport isles and the stage. Around the stage the floor can be covered with ice and used as a rink during hockey games and other ice skating events, hence the higher concrete quality there.
During the work with the epoxy removal, during wich CA 1 diamond tools were used, they noticed that the concrete under the spectator platform had a lot of cracks that needed to be fixed. For that work a so called ”crack chaser” was used (the crack chaser is a wider diamond wheel with a v-shaped edge), to shape the cracks and prepare for screed and repairs. A total length of 4000 meters of cracks were sawed and repaired during the work with good result. For the floor grinding four machines were used, three HTC 800 HD and a remote controlled HTC 950 RX. For dust extractions purposes three HTC 75 D´s and a rented HTC 110 D were put to use, which secured the dust handling.
As mentioned above the floor renovation commenced with CA 1 segments, which also proved able to remove the epoxy, after that the grinding sequence with CA 2 and MBC 2 followed and an impregnation with HTC Cure. The grinding with the metal bond segments were completed with MBC 4. After that they could start the real transformation of the floor with the resin bond diamond tools FP 20, 40 and 60. All grinding and polishing were performed dry. The result was very good, you could even say too good. An HTC Superfloor™ is reflecting light exceptionally well and that is not always and advantage in connection to setting the lights on a stage, therefore the Spektrum managment decided to lower the shine with FP 30 and they received a result everybody was happy with.
The floor today
Earlier problems with cleaning and flaking epoxy have been totally eliminated. Besides that they will commence cleaning with the TWISTER-system in the premises. This means that the shine and cleanliness will be maintained. The floor is very easy to maintain also if you need to do major renovations, something vastly more difficult with epoxy. On one occasion a big wheel loader created coarse scratch marks with the bucket tooths, but since the floor is a HTC Superfloor™ they only needed to repolish the damaged parts and the floor looked as good as ever. Besides the practical benefits the Oslo Spektrum now also have floor of higher quality and better shine.
