Source: Marks Metal Technology, Clackamas, Ore.; CP staff
Formwork specialist Marks Metal and longtime Las Vegas customer Rockway Precast have refined a template for a 15-ft. high Water Bottle structure bearing the novelty that developer Dapper Companies sought plus the functionality of a fully enclosed, municipal water filtration system.
With precast top and base pieces mimicking the profile of a typical 5-gal. vessel, the structure shelters an eight-stage process to provide retail customers a purified alternative to marginal tap water. By laminating a series of rolled heavy steel bars into manageable shapes, Marks Metal was able to create the complex exterior bottle profiles. To ensure that the required two-piece form would hold its shape under the extreme conditions of casting a large product, all of the heavy machined profiles were thermally stress relieved in a shipyard oven. This guaranteed that the form would pull apart easily and go back together without distortion. Afterwards, the steel bars were machined into a portion of the water bottle profile on a 176-in. diameter CNC vertical boring mill. When all of the precision machined pieces were finished they were stacked in the correct order to produce the many curves needed to yield a jumbo version of a 5-gal. bottle.
The first Water Bottle was put into operation in 2011 and was made using a strip form. Using the Marks Metal form, Rockway Precast has delivered Las Vegas-based Dapper Water Bottles for local and Phoenix installations. The developer plans to install an additional 15 to 20 Water Bottle stations in the Las Vegas and Arizona markets this year.