Peeling away the myth about how the Golden Gate Bridge is painted | Hacker News Reader

Peeling away the myth about how the Golden Gate Bridge is painted

sfgate.com

14 pointsStratoscope9 comments

> Engineers inspect areas for repainting, and then ironworkers set up the 70-by-70-feet rooms called containments to hold in the blasted sand and paint. Nothing but rainwater can fall off the bridge.

How does that work? How do the containments contain the sand and paint, and where are they set up and supported?

I think that they are referring to what amounts to scaffolding+shrinkwrap:

https://shrinkwrapcontainments.com/image-gallery/

Near the bottom of the page there are a couple photos of the Golden Gate.

Most probably they have "traveling scaffolding" for the standard parts and some specific built-on-spot structures for other parts.

There's a similar story about the Forth Bridge, in Scotland.

Nowadays it doesn't need to be painted so often:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-147...

TBH IMO SF missed out by not using the Navy suggested wasp color scheme.

This would have been so much more in line with some pieces of SciFi book covers, like from Chris Foss, f.e.

Ahead of its time.

This may be a good place to ask since so many people from the Bay Area hang out here. Was it ever gray, even for a short time? I know someone who adamantly claims to have driven over a gray Golden Gate Bridge back in the 70s, and being disappointed because of it. I suggested it might have been the bay bridge, but the two look pretty different, even if they had been painted in the same colour.

There's a great children's history book titled "This Bridge Will Not Be Gray" by Dave Eggers that goes into the early days of the color choice. The bridge was shipped over from east coast metal works in orange, so it was not gray to begin with. The choice to keep it orange involved some public support so I think it is unlikely that it was ever painted gray, even temporarily.

Yes, my thinking is that if it ever was gray there would have been so much outcry that it is bound to show up in search results and be mentioned by any outlines of the bridge’s history.

I feel like I have a fuzzy early 80s childhood memory of a gray Golden Gate Bridge but I can’t be sure or prove it. Maybe it’s like a Bernstein Bears thing, where I have the same wrong memory as other people.

Can't you email the people on the official website https://www.goldengate.org/ and provide that information to the thread, as opposed to asking random strangers who could say anything?

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