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The 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games have come and gone but their legacy lives on

It’s unlikely that few places rang in 2010 with as much excitement as British Columbia. After all, the province had been working toward that year since winning the bid for the Winter Games back in 2003.

As we approach the end of the year and near the first anniversary of the games we decided to take a look back from a woodworking perspective. We talked to three companies, Towne Millwork, Island Precision and Mosiac Millwork, for the scoop on their spotlight-worthy projects.

Towne Millwork -- Project: 2 BC Place Stadium

Located in Vancouver, the multipurpose, domed stadium played host to the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. Before that, however, it needed some work to get it ready for the international spotlight. For Towne Millwork, their year-long involvement in phase 1 of BC Place’s revitalization project included renovating all the washrooms and concessions, adding a few concessions and all the signage. “We didn’t actually do the finished signs but we supplied all the surrounds and the background and everything needed for the signs to be applied to,” explains Towne Millwork president, Greg Hesketh.

In addition, the Abbotsford, B.C.-based company did the millwork for the suite corridors as well as the suites themselves which were demolished and completely redone. “There was quite a bit of coordination required between the glass guy that was importing glass from Germany and the audio-visual guys and the seating guys. And some of these spaces are only 200 square feet so there was a fair amount of tight quarters and coordination that needed to make sure everybody put everything in the right place.”

Despite that, Hesketh describes the project as a “very good experience. It was very well run, it was very well-coordinated. Once all the details got worked out, it ran along quite smooth and quickly.”

Along with an excellent relationship with the contractor, significant planning helped make the project a success. “We spent a lot of time working things in the office and doing mock ups here in the shop before we even thought about taking it out to site.” Once there, it installed very quickly. Planning was the key to the bulk of the work, he says, describing the building as neither a true oval or circle. “Every section, every piece is almost different other than a few of the straight sections. Every room that we were working in was a little bit different so we had to find a way that would work in all the rooms so we weren’t making everything different.”

With a job well done, Towne Millwork has moved onto other projects. But they take with them a crucial piece of knowledge which is sure to lead them to even greater future success. “We learned that we can do a lot bigger projects than we think we can,” says Hesketh.

Island Precision -- Project: Vancouver Convention Centre

Inside the Vancouver Convention Centre, home of the broadcast centre for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, visitors can not only see a spectacular homage to the beauty of B.C.’s forests, but a testament to the power of human ingenuity and innovation.

“[The architects] had this concept that a huge stack of lumber,” explains Island Precision  president, Jeff Popham. The huge undertaking started with the Victoriabased team figuring out how to make the vision a reality. “We ended up making these wall panels,” says Popham. In fact, there were really more like three products: one designed to look like end blocks, a second like the sides of boards and then corner modules. Originally, the latter was designed as a mitered corner. “It would have been pretty hard to make and wouldn’t have been very durable or the wood would have expanded and contracted and it wouldn’t have stayed together perfectly,” he explains. “We finally figured out we could cut the corner out of what we call a dog leg or cut out of a solid hunk of wood.”

The end blocks were another concern. “We worried about expansion and contraction of the wood and how we were going to keep the blocks on so that they could move around with temperature and humidity but not pop themselves off,” says Popham. After some testing, the company settled on plywood instead of particleboard or MDF as a backer board. They also changed the finish. “Originally they specified a lacquer finish but we wanted the wood to be able to breathe so that it could expand and contract more freely.” Instead, the company came up with a finish of beeswax, carnauba wax and shellac. The water-based finish meant that they could also touch it up on site if they had to.

After figuring out each of these challenges —the corners, how to make the end blocks and what finish to use —they moved on to the next step: how to actually make it all. “There’s about a 100,000 thousand square feet of wall panels, 6,000 panels plus or minus,” explains Popham. “On the end block ones I think there’s about 860,000 individual blocks that we had to figure out how to put them on.” To assemble them, the company used a robotic arm. “We had to come up with a pattern and a method of making the pattern so that you couldn’t notice it repeating on the wall,” he says. “They wanted it to look random and I think it did end up looking pretty close to random. But there’s a lot of design there.”

With the sheer volume of wood pieces, keeping order became essential. So the team drew elevations of the whole building and then figured out where each panel and block would go. “So when we were building them, each panel was numbered and sent to a specific location so as you take them off the pile they just interlock together and go up the wall.” As challenging as the stacks were to create, installing the ceilings was even harder, says Popham. “The beams they’re like a lamibeam —like four two by fours glued together —and they can make these great long beams.” Though Island Precision purchased these, they were still left the daunting task of installing 9,000 laminated Douglas Fir beams onto ceilings that, in some places, were 60 feet up. They devised the idea of suspending the beams from a metal grid on adjustable hardware. After renting a bunch of cranes and scaffolding, the team began the precise installation work. “We had to lay them so that a run of beams had to be completely straight and hang perfectly —horizontal in some cases, in other cases they were on an angle and they got a reveal from one beam to the next.” All those reveals, explains Popham, had to line up with each other and be exactly ½ an inch. “We designed and had custom manufactured this special hanging hardware that gave us some degree of adjustability. But it took us a long time to figure out how to get them up because in adjusting for example, to get it plum, that would knock out your horizontal adjustment. And then you’d get it all horizontal and the reveal [wouldn’t] line up anymore. So we figured out that there was a process.”

Mosaic Millwork -- Project: Southeast False Creek Community Centre (at Vancouver Olympic Village)

Part of the Olympic Village, the 45,000 square foot Southeast False Creek Community Centre provided office space for the Olympic and Paralympic mayor, management staff and four Host First Nations. It also served as an amenities location for athletes. It reopened as a public facility in the summer of 2010 as the Creekside Community Recreation Centre. Mosaic Millwork was part of the team behind the LEED-certified building, awarded the contract for a number of projects within the building including casework for the centre’s daycare centre, wall-towall panelling in the multi purpose room and gym, and change room benches.

The bulk of the work for the Surrey, B.C.-based company came from the casework in the centre’s third floor daycare, says project manager Adam Christiaanse. As with the overall project, the space was broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks. “We did the same in fabrications. We automated our process as much as possible with the different pieces of software that we used to try and make it as automated as possible and as simple as possible for the guys who work on the show floor. We tried to manage everything upstairs in the office.”

Another big component of the job was the bamboo panelling that went into the centre’s multipurpose room on the second floor. “The room consisted of a lot of windows and where there were no windows there was bamboo panelling. So the whole room was covered in bamboo panelling where it could be covered,” he says. “The multipurpose rooms were something like 20 to 25 foot high ceiling and the ceiling were kind of open and exposed and our panelling went up about 11 feet.” In total, about 60 sheets of bamboo were used. Between the panels, the team used aluminum laminate reveals.

Along with the tight timelines associated with the project, another huge challenge turned out to be sourcing out the materials that were acceptable to the LEED and FSC-certification, says Christiaanse who did a lot of research upfront to get up to speed on requirements. iWe worked together with both the architect and our suppliers to sort through material requirements. We met at our suppliers warehouse and sorted through several material choices to find one suitable for this project.”

Choosing the particular materials — the bulk of which was birch plywood with a birch veneer — proved to be much easier than sourcing the large quantities of material needed for some of the work. “Finding enough material of the bamboo to actually do the job —that was a challenge,” says Christiaanse who describes working on a LEED project as a big learning process. “That bamboo material comes from China. It had to be FSC-certified bamboo which was a challenge.” At the time, the Mosaic team could only find one manufacturer who adhered to those standards. “For that manufacturer to come up with the quantity of panels we needed to finish the job was a challenge.”

With a job well done and more LEED experience under their belt, Christianne says he’s proud the team was able to meet the tight deadlines. “The architect is very happy with us. The contactor is very happy with us. Everything looks very good.”

 

 

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