PAINTING PROBLEMS

Evening Star, Issue 20720, 17 February 1931, Page 2

PAINTING PROBLEMS

HAPPENINGS IN AUSTRALIA Two matters are just now presenting paramount interest to tho painting and decorating industry in Australia (reports the ‘New Zealand. Decorator’s’ correspondent). The first is the trouble recently experienced in regard to ready mixed paints and bound up with it, white lead restrictions, and the second is apprenticeship. Decently there have been complaints concerning the failure of certain readymixed paints. This, of course, has cast a shadow over the whole ready-mixed paint business, despite the fact that in any country where there is no legislation to regulate ready-mixed paints all sorts of substitutes for load are used to the detriment of the paint. Naturally, master painters and decivatirs’ associations have sought to clear the m alter up, and the consensus of opinion appears to trace the trouble to the substitutes for white lead. In the opinion, for instance of Mr J, Charlton (president of the Master Painters and Decorators’ Association of Queensland), after twenty-five years’ experience, for outside us© there is no other pigment that will give the same durability as lead. Zinc and titanium in balanced quantities is the next host substitute, thinks Mr Charlton. Tho question of apprenticeship in the building trade not only affects boys apprenticed as painters and decorators, but all building trade apprentices, simply because of the general slackness of trade. The position has arisen where employers are being compelled to seek the permission of the Arbitration Courts to stand their boys down. Whilst this action may give relief to the employer, it does not get over the difficulty of throwing a boy into idleness just at a time when he should bo fully occupied. So serious has this question become that the blaster Builders’ Federation of Australia at its re-

cent conference discussed the matter, but unfortunately was unable to put forward any constructive scheme to overcome the trouble. The idleness of boys was deplored, but no way out of the difficulty could be found except by attendance at technical colleges or trade classes during their unemployment. This to some extent is the rule in Queensland, where the Act is administered by committees representing the employers and employees in the various trades, and where the boy is required to attend the Technical College mainly for intensive and theoretical training during the employer’s as well as his own time. Another matter discussed at the Master Builders’ Conference was conditions of contract, and as a result of this and a subsequent meeting held by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects uniform conditions of contract for the whole of Australia are now the rule; each State formerly worked under its own conditions. The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, by the way, is only a newly-formed body which has absorbed the various State institutes as chapters.

A striking illustration of the use of zino chloride-treated timbers in roofs is that of a paper mill in Ontario with a daily capacity of 350 tons of newsprint, 125 tons of sulphite, and 300 tons of groundwood (says ‘ Wood Preserving News’). In the roof construction 851,000 board feet of timber was used, pressure treated according to plank, ov<jr which is placed 2*in of insulite, with another top layer of Sin treated plank covered with a four-ply tar. and gravel roof. The inside of the roofs was painted white in order to afford more light and better working conditions in the various rooms. Operations incident to the manufacture of paper create vapour which rises to the ceiling, condenses, and results in an alternately wet and dry condition of the timber roofs. This condition is conducive to decay, and if the roofs have not been given preservative treatment they are said to be comparatively short lived..