premarking and laying out a bike trail

Hey all. We have an on-going project right now striping a bike trail. The engineering firm that's overseeing this job is picky. When I say picky, I mean airport picky, no layout lines visible once you are done. We even had to color match the paint to a tan color that they are tinting the curbs. Anyway, I don't have an AL so don't rub it in (next machine we get will have it). I'm currently using a jig that we put up against our layout line to show where the skips will fall and we only mark that section. This is time consuming, it takes all day to layout 2 miles. Again, I know auto-layout would get this done in no time,but that's not an option for me right now, so do any of you guys have any tricks you use to reduce layout time on something like this?

Cable. Aircraft type cable (3/8's) diameter. Lays in place, chalk (tic) marks, & normally won't move if spraying along side of it. Hope this helps.

Yeah, we use 1/4" cord (a little bigger than the pull rope on your machine), getting center laid out isn't the issue, if i could mark the whole cord and figure out spacing later, I can do about a mile an hour. The killer is getting the spacing on the skips marked out, takes forever.

What spacing is required?

Layout the cord for spaces on the skips. Do you have that on a electric cord reel? Tie ribbon on cord. Put cord down transfer the layout to ground.

Rcan: spacing is 3' skip, 12' cycle. Amazing: That's the direction I think I'm going to go in. The only problem that I could run into is the marks moving around. I thought of using zip-ties, but dragging the cord will probably break or move them. crimp-on brass brads maybe? 7 hours of labor vs 2 hours of labor.... Gah, I miss the days when I just had to do whatever the foreman said. Oh, yeah, the cord is reeled up on a $5.00 electric cord reel we get at Wal-mart. It'll hold almost 500'.

use a roller tape to mark your spacing, i done it using it , bikelanes, skipdash, centerlines etc, mark them as you going and then pull your cord and with inverted paint mark them, come back and following your pointer paint them covering the layout markings. I done like that for the past 15 years never have a problem.

you should be able to do a mile an hour using that method.

You could use a graco autolayout line lazer would make the layout process much easier

The engineering firm that's overseeing the job could possibly be idiots! There long term priority should be that the finished job is done to a high standard. Screw some idiot that is so feeble as to worry about a few temporary chalk lines -- come on, give me a break, the goal is to have a great finished piece of work without worrying about a little residual blue chalk that is going to disappear (don't use red chalk -- that isn't a temporary chalk color!). As far as layout/ tick marks, use a soap stone if want them to disappear quickly. By the way, did you know about thier mental disorder going into this job?

Got a picture or any more info on that electric cord reel? I would like to know more about it. Thanks.

I either step them off or tie water bottles to a small rope and either tie that to the back of the ll or my belt loop

Chris wrote on Aug 30, 2009:Go to #11

Got a picture or any more info on that electric cord reel? I would like to know more about it. Thanks.

We get ours from Wal-mart. they sell for 5-10 bucks. They don't hold up extremely well ,but hey, did I mention they cost 5-10 bucks? My guys tend to break it after about 6 months and I'll buy them one out of company funds once a year.

Markings #1 wrote on Aug 30, 2009:Go to #10

The engineering firm that's overseeing the job could possibly be idiots! There long term priority should be that the finished job is done to a high standard. Screw some idiot that is so feeble as to worry about a few temporary chalk lines -- come on, give me a break, the goal is to have a great finished piece of work without worrying about a little residual blue chalk that is going to disappear (don't use red chalk -- that isn't a temporary chalk color!). As far as layout/ tick marks, use a soap stone if want them to disappear quickly. By the way, did you know about thier mental disorder going into this job?

Yes, we did know that the engineering firm was gonna be this way, our price reflected it too. As for the tan colored paint (with beads!), whoever came up with that either got really lucky, or was a mad genius, because it actually looks really,really sharp. Seriously, beads on dirt-colored paint? Who thinks of doing that? We get about a mile every two hours because everything has to be just so, but we make a killing once the paint goes down so it all works out. Using chalk instead of inverted marking paint is an option I'll have to think about on these things as well. MIKE: I used to step them off too, but thats just not accurate enough for this particular firm. They will take a tape measure to the job and have had other people sandblast and correct any issues they found.

another way I mark this , is turn your tip over to clean out and reduce your pressure to 300lbs and trigger it at your marked intervals on your rope , it makes a parfect drizzle line which you later paint over, you can mark really fast using this method, I mostly do this when painting really long lines longer than 200 ft otherwise I snap them. just mark your rope with tape. I shure you are already finished.

Yeah, we finished it up and it looks nice. About 4 miles of it are done, but they are talking about doing anywhere from 4 to 12 more. (Its privately funded, depends on how far the backers want to take it) 2 more miles are under construction right now and they skipped over about a mile due to other construction in the area. So I still have time for improvement. Something i tried for marking center was to set my pointer bar on the edge of the pavement, reverse the tip, turn down the pressure and run pre-marks out of the gun 5' offset from edge. But I wasn't really happy with the results. This is one of those jobs that just screams autolayout. Still working up the numbers on that to try to convince owners to let me get one.

I usually lay out a rope and mark it that way