Beams are fabricated by Harbor Technologies, Brunswick, Maine. Kristofer Grimnes, product development manager made the product very user friendly. The SCIGRIP adhesive offered other benefits like little or no odor during curing, he said. Todd McKechnie, the NAC sales representative who handles Harbor Technologies, pointed out that NAC is more than just a distributor. “We offer our customers so many more key valued added services,” he said. McKechnie continued to explain that NAC relies on the expertise of their suppliers, like SCIGRIP, for technical support in finding solutions for their customers. Both McKechnie and Karen Brock Amoah, SCIGRIP structural adhesive sales and marketing director, and the SCIGRIP technical service team worked hand-in-hand with Harbor Technologies to identify their specific bonding requirements and ultimately recommended SCIGRIP SG230 HV for this novel bridge beam application. One reason for selecting SCIGRIP SG230 HV adhesive was because of its unique combination of tensile, elongation and shear strength properties and its proven performance bonding composites for Harbor Technologies said several methyl methacrylate (MMA) adhesives were tested for this HCB application.

Our distributor, North American Composites (NAC), Lino Lakes, Minn., told us SCIGRIP adhesive products have a proven track record for bonding and assembling composites and that they would produce stronger, better bonds than the other adhesive system we were contemplating using in this application, Grimnes said. “But what we didn’t realize was that by using SCIGRIP adhesive and by switching over from our current labor intensive applicator to a bulk pneumatic meter mix dispensing system, our material costs would be reduced and our labor cost would go down,” he said Grimnes said it was unbelievable that we were able to reduce our bonding costs nearly 50 percent and still produce superior structural bonds in the bridge beams.