Painting the Eiffel Tower | Hacker News Reader

Painting the Eiffel Tower

toureiffel.paris

107 pointsredbell70 comments

I have a recurring nightmare where I'm painting the top of the Seattle Space Needle. I'm tethered to the roof with a belt and rope. I have a paint roller on a long stick about the length of a broom. I have to walk to the edge of the top of the saucer, and every dang time I accidentally drop the stick, which falls over the edge. Sometimes a seagull flies close to me startling me, or a stiff wind, or just a fumbling of my hands. Fearing for the safety of the families down below I scramble to try and snatch it and lose my balance and footing and go over the edge.

I'm tethered to the roof so I don't plunge to the ground. But I'm violently swinging hundreds of feet in mid-air unable to get back up. It's always the same. And I can feel the wind, my hands sweating, my feet tingling and my heart beating beyond belief. Usually when I start to fall over the edge I wake up. Sometimes I dangle for a second or two as I dizzily flip around hearing muffled screams from far below.

I can't imagine being one of the people forced to paint the Eiffel Tower, or Golden Gate Bridge - whatever. The thought of it makes me ill.

Forced to paint? Do they use prison labor or something?

I used to have nightmares involving open elevator platforms with no railing, 10 meters tall, moving unpredictably at high speed.

You’d have to be quick when stepping onto them because they might drop away at any moment, leaving you tumbling down after it.

A painting campaign lasts between 18 months and 3 years, and the tower is repainted every 7 years. So, basically it’s being painted upwards of 35% of the time for longer campaigns. That’s a lot of maintenance!

They should probably just rebuild it in cor-ten and be done with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathering_steel

A paint job takes up to 3 years today, yet the entire tower (including painting) was built in 2 years, 140 years ago?!?

It wasn't open while it was being built, but it is open while being painted.

And I dare say they could paint it much much faster if they really needed to, but it would involve very large crew for a short period of time.

Better for everyone involved if the work is basically steady - then you can hire one group or company for a three year stint, instead of hiring 5-10x for 6 months.

Might even be better to delay it even further so you can just keep painting indefinitely with a small crew.

That's what SF doesa with the golden gate. Want to say it gets repainted every 18 months or something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge#Maintenance

I imagine you could just tape it, wrap it and then fumigate it with paint. Would go much quicker.

Someone tell me why I’m wrong

You’ll miss lots of nooks and crannies because you can’t convince the air currents to blow in every conceivable way to move paint around. You air movement apparatus will take on much of the paint, probably causing it to function in much less than an ideal manner. There are challenges with keeping the paint wet while moving it with air pressure.

You could probably get VC funding to solve these problems and then you’d be onto something.

Depending on how paint "wears out" maybe the parts you would miss are the parts that don't really need to be repainted.

I don't think there's any part of the structure that doesn't need repainted, or rain/dust will get in and tear it apart over decades.

Where do you think “speed” sits on the stack-ranking of priorities for Eiffel Tower repainting/surface maintenance?

For a monument of its value, I would almost think speed/lower cost would be seen as red flags.

The obvious, much quicker way would be to drop the required 60 tonnes of paint from Canadairs in a fly by. /s

> fumigate

I guess it'd be more like the electrostatic paint they do for cars. Negatively charge your object and positively charge your paint...

The numbers measure different things, so hard to compare. One of the biggest sources of variation listed is the weather, while the first paint was done in a workshop (presumably where there is no influence from the weather).

Also, a painting campaign also includes:

> ... a preparatory stage to search for the most corroded areas ... these areas are then stripped, and a first coat of an anti-rust primer is applied

...presumably there was no corrosion just after the parts were originally made.

For sure on corrosion/rust - I’m experiencing this on a very small scale now - I’m working on repainting my old barbecue, it’s incredible how much time it takes to strip, apply rust remover, clean, fill, sand, prime and repaint the metal parts. Easily 5 to 10 times as much effort and time than it would take to paint fresh parts.

I am pretty sure the original materials also had to be sand blasted then shop primed. Raw steel material usually comes without any protection and stays outside for a long time.

To be fair that would mean taking it apart, repainting and rebuilding it would optimistically take 4 years, so painting it in situ is still faster.

I think the question is why does it take longer to paint it than it took to build it?

Because they probably didn't need to strip any old paint off first.

I my experience of painting houses etc (limited I know), the actual painting bit is the final 25-33% of the time. The rest of it is making the rest of it ready to be painted. So stripping off, preparing the surfaces, making good any bad bits etc ... only then can you start to paint it.

When they had fresh new metal to work with they could probably just paint straight away with zero prep. It may have even arrived at the site already primed. Plus it was probably easier logistics too in terms of seeing which bits were painted or not - if you are painting over the same colour it is hard to know what you have done and what you have not unless you are quite meticulous. However if you have a good contrast you could just give paintbrushes to 100 people and say "keep painting until all the grey bits are red" or whatever and not worry about the planning or tracking of which bits have been done when - just keep going until everything is red or whatever.

As a housepainter, this is probably the best reasoning and where my mind immediately jumped to. The prep work in painting is as you said the majority of the work -- many many many hours spent first slowly destroying something further, then bringing a surface back to the state where, finally, you get to make it all one solid color of protection, once again.

Generally the largest difference in a homeowner painted themselves vs a professional painter -- the amount of prep work required can be astronomical and absolutely mind numbing but without it, one will never end up with the final very nice and long(er) lasting result.

Once again, you get back what you put in!

This guy paints.

Seriously though, if you use house drywall painting over existing paint as an example, the actual "paint on surface" step really is short. In my most recent paint adventure the procedure was:

o move furniture

o lay down canvas

o tape

o sand

o [prime, depends on base and final color]

o paint

o wait to dry

o sand

o paint

o undo the coverings.

o enjoy.

It is very difficult to get all that done in one day, but I see new house interiors get basically painted in one-two day by a crew of like 6 guys, followed by an unending series of touch-ups where the painters did a half-assed job on trim, ceilings, and large featureless wall sections where it's difficult to see where paint is lacking.

IME Painting is boring and very easy to get wrong so I have respect for painters that patiently do the job right the first time.

Painting a room is one of those weird jobs that takes a lot of concentration (especially cutting in), and very little thought. I find it goes better with a beer in one hand. Given that basically every paint can opener on the planet is also a bottle opener, I suspect that I'm not the only one.

The article says there are 50 painters. I'm sure there were more than 50 people working to build it.

Did they build it then paint it? Or paint it (the components, during fabrication), then build it, with already-painted components?

They pained individual pieces before assembly but that was included in the total construction time.

that's the point of the question. of course this is much faster than building then painting.

Doing this with fewer employees over a longer period of time may just be more efficient. Surely they could speed it up by throwing more money at it, but does that help with anything?

Sounds like you're unaware of what is involved in repainting. You don't think they just climb up and spray over the bird crap and other contaminates? 80% of the work is in prep and the technology in coatings 140 years ago wasn't where it's at today.

as an analogy, consider that renovating often is much more difficult and complex than new construction. As you build up you're making some irreversible moves, i.e. you build a door or a set of trusses, now you can't move a large piece through it anymore.

On the other hand, building it took a lot more manyears than one round of repainting.

They also appear to be stripping the old paint during this re-painting process.

Because they’re using very old methods. We have much more modern ways to paint metal that aren’t being used. They could use electrostatic painting and finish the thing in a day if they really wanted.

https://www.ghasterpaintinginc.com/blog/what-electrostatic-p....

The Golden Gate Bridge is constantly being painted. The conditions are harsher, I suppose. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/is-the-golden-gate-bridg...

I thought this was a fact of all famous and suitably large bridges like the Sydney harbour and Forth bridges. Because painting doesn’t effect the running of the bridge much they just hire enough painters that gets the bridge painted in time and then start again. Apparently the Forth bridge now uses a new paint that means it doesn’t need to be painted for 20 years though

Seeing the signs near the Golden Gate Bridge about how it's painted (EDIT: like a decade ago) made me think that it'd be a good idea to use drones to paint it. I explored that idea a bit deeper but it never went anywhere. There are/were some attempts at painting drones. I still think it'd be cool and could be made to work ;)

I suppose the risk of pollution would be too high, but it'd make for a cool demo.

Once on a bike ride, I met a guy who worked painting the GGB. He said he was about 50, but look 65, so it seemed plausible. He wasn't wearing a helmet even on descents, which I asked him about, and his answer was that he spends all day in a harness with hard helmet, so the last thing he wanted was more helmet time in the weekend.

The Sydney harbour Bridge is painted all year round!

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/ag-blog/2013/1...

Similar maintenance schedule to large steel naval vessels. Rust never sleeps.

It's like rolling updates. You don't want to take the whole cluster offline while you upgrade. reply

So basically, the Eiffel Tower has been painted nearly twenty times. It’s been shades of red, yellow, brown, and grey, and has never been painted black.. yet I always had the impression of it being black.

I see a Tower and I want to paint it black...

I've never thought of it black, and I'm a bit at loss as how someone could do so. Look, for instance, at the picture from the associated Wikipedia article. Does that strike you as black?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Tour_Eif...

In Person it really looks like dark gray. None of the pictures I took last time I was there look anything like the picture linked. They show a very dark gray tower.

Depends on the light, in the ones I have from April it looks quite brown but in my pics from cloudier days it does look a bit more of a brown-grey colour.

It's probably souvenir tchotchkes, eg: https://www.amazon.com/Eiffel-Tower-Statue/dp/B072KLPVG5/

Lots of black-and-white pictures, lots of pictures in silhouette.

Pictures of the tower can also have a lot of... texture? If you don't know you're looking at "brown with shadows" you might think you're looking at "black with highlights."

Hey, Eiffel tower: if it's illegal to photograph you, taking a photograph slower by using human hands and paint using the you as canvas should be just as illegal. Stop trying to have your cake and eat it, too, Paris has a history of cake-related incidents that apply here.

To say nothing of your argument around painting the Eiffel Tower (which I assume you meant in a different sense than the article...)

It has been legal to photograph the Eiffel Tower since 1993 (its copyright expired.) It is legal to take photographs of the Eiffel Tower's light show since Oct 2016 ("freedom of panorama") unless used for commercial purposes.

French newspaper critized the current company managing the Eiffel Tower, saying they botched maintenance job: https://www.marianne.net/societe/mal-en-point-rouillee-la-to...

Marianne est peut-être pas la meilleure source..

Pourquoi ?

one lifehack for me was to skip the claustrophobic packed elevator and to go on foot, at least on the way down. Ran into almost no people, much closer experience of the tower.

I was having fun a couple of nights ago watching "the man on the Eiffel tower(1949)" and reading about the tower on wikipedia, you know as one does. Some fun facts.

The bars were cut and drilled in a factory to dimension and no on site modification was allowed. if the bar did not fit it was sent back the the factory.

Eiffel(with a well respected engineering firm) payed for most of the tower himself. in return he was given 20 years exclusive exploitation rights. and had a private apartment at the top.

The tower was not only the first building taller than 200 meters it was the first building taller than 300 meters.

There was a project that would have dismantled the tower and re-erected it for a Canadian worlds fair(note that this is possible because everything was made to dimension in a factory). Thankfully it never went through. The worlds fair promised to put it back when done... but I have my doubts.

The nazis wanted to tear it down for scrap. but the civil unrest raised delayed this project long enough for the liberation of paris.

Reminds me anecdotally, at least in local folklore- the Forth Road Bridge near Edinburgh. One man would paint it and as soon as he's finished, he had to start again due to the size of it.

Engineering marvels, but maintenance required.

I would've loved to see those early colors in person

Or at least in photograph.

At least photographs of the Eiffel tower before 1985 can't fall foul of their slightly obsessive copyright restrictions.

Just turn it to black&white, and then ask Color Diffusion to colorize it for you

The Eiffel-inspired tower in Tokyo is painted orange to comply with air safety regulations [1]. The color always looked odd to me but I guess it’s not so different from the Eiffel in the past.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Tower

Wonder what kind of paints they use nowadays? Presumably ye olde lead oxide paints are verboten.

While I'm no expert on this topic, it seems zinc epoxy primer + polysiloxane topcoat is the state of the art these days for industrial / marine steel coating applications.

Surely you mean lead oxide paints are interdite >.<

Related: Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman, that contains a chapter about the Statue of Liberty with lots of intricacies about coating.

They should try bright pink.

Or paint it white, then use lighting to make it change colors.

I'm surprised they have not installed LEDs on it to make it whatever color they want

For the colours with light they already do it, only on occasions though.

I once read that it took 7 tons of paint for a single coat.

I read just now, from the article, that it takes 60 tons of paint total.

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