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Category Archives: modular enclosures

Posts relating to modular enclosure products and installations

Finishes of modular building wall panels

When starting out on a project, it’s important to pick the right material. Painted mild steel rusts when used outdoors. Wood products swell when soaked. Stainless steel is expensive. You need to compare the properties of the material against the environment in which it will be utilized.

Modular wall systems are a versatile piece of equipment used in a number of different environments and applications. Because of this, we offer a number of different types of finishes on the panels so that we can meet the different requirements of the project.

Modular building panels with a vinyl finish

6 mil. vinyl, Class A fire rated, stipple textured vinyl. Bone and white are standard.

Bone vinyl over gypsum A-wall building panel

The vast majority of the modular buildings we provide feature a vinyl finish to the panels. It serves as our best, and most cost effective, general all-purpose finish, offering you a clean finish to the panel so that you don’t need to paint the walls in the field. Being covered in vinyl also allows you to clean them with a damp sponge if the walls get dirty. One common application where we would use vinyl clad panels would be in an office space.

Modular building panels with a painted steel finish

Embossed, 24 gauge, galvanized, painted steel. Almond and white are standard. Smooth also available.

Almond painted steel over gypsum A-wall modular building panel

Another common option that we offer is to finish the panels with painted steel sheets, which can be applied to the inside of the panel, the outside of the panel, or both. Most commonly this is used in equipment enclosures where we are concerned that something might pierce the walls. The steel sheet acts as a layer of armor helping to prevent shrapnel from puncturing the system. The steel sheets also offer an additional benefit important in many equipment enclosures. Our typical wall panels consisting of two sheets of ½” gypsum board separated by polystyrene studs generally offer an STC of 32. The additional mass of the steel helps minimize the ability of sound to be transmitted through the walls. For each side of the wall that is clad in steel the STC rating increases roughly by one.

Fiberglass reinforced plastic modular building panel finish

Pebble textured, Class C fire rated, Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic. Khaki and white are standard. Smooth and Class A also available.

Khaki FRP clad gypsum modular wall panel

The third most common finish that we offer is fiberglass reinforced plastic (or FRP). FRP is our most durable modular wall panel finish. It holds up exceptionally well to various scrapes and abrasions, and the FRP is a more water resistant finish as well. One of the most common applications where we’ll use an FRP wall panel finish would be for bathroom walls.

Tempered Safety Glass Windows

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This past week I had a customer who had a slight misunderstanding of what tempered safety glass was, so I thought I’d take a minute to discuss just what tempered glass is and the safety features it provides.

Tempered (or toughened) glass is a type of safety glass in which chemical or thermal treatments are used to strengthen it so that it is harder to break then standard glass. Tempering compresses the outer surfaces and puts the inner surfaces of the glass into tension. When broken, these forces cause the glass to crumble into granular chunks as opposed to larger sharp edged pieces, and are much less likely to cut you. This is why auto manufactures use tempered safety glass in the side and rear windows of cars.

If you’ve ever had a broken side window on your car, you’ve seen how when tempered safety glass breaks it shatters into hundreds of small grainy pieces all over the inside of your car. If you’ve broken your windshield though, you can see a spider web of cracks throughout the window, but it typically stays in its frame as opposed to filling the car with pieces of glass. Auto manufactures do something different with the windshields. They use laminated safety glass.

If the goal is to keep your modular building‘s window in its frame if it breaks, you’ll need to look at either wired glass or laminated glass.

Relocating a Modular Office

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A-Wall 200 modular in-plant office. Still in great shape after one reconfiguration and 6+ years of use.

One of the major advantages of modular building systems over traditional construction is their ability to adapt to your changing needs. Let’s take this project for example.

6+ year old A-Wall 200 modular office. Here, the first reconfiguration moved the door from the other side of the building.

6+ year old modular office after the first reconfiguration moving the door from the other side of the building.

Back in early 2008, we provided the customer with a 24’ wide x 42’ long x 9’ high modular in-plant office. The original layout had three doors. There were two on one 24’ end, and one on the other. A few years later as their layout around the building was changing, the 24’ long wall with two doors was going to get blocked off. By disassembling a portion of the building and swapping 4’ panels with one another, the customer was able to relocate the doors to the 42’ long walls.

Over the years the customer’s needs continued to change. They recently decided to remove the in-plant office. If this was built out of traditional construction, the office space would be torn down and that would be the

Installing the reconfigured in-plant office in its new location. Recessed beams used to support the roof deck due to the long spans.

end of it. However, as this was modular construction, the customer found another spot in their plant where the building could be relocated in a slightly smaller (24’ wide x 34’ long) form.

We were able to reuse almost all of the materials when we relocated it. We replaced the base track, as well as the ceiling grid and tiles. The base track is very difficult to remove without creating kinks in the channel. As the panels fit very snuggly into new base track, any kink in the track can make it almost impossible to fit. Likewise, the material cost to replace the ceiling grid and tiles is usually significantly less than the additional labor to carefully disassemble the ceiling for reuse.

Relocating the modular office panels

There were some additional considerations that went into the reconfiguration to maximize the materials we could reuse. On the A-Wall building systems with a non-load bearing roof, we can span the roof deck a maximum 20’. In the original 24’x42’ layout, we used a couple of 24’ long recessed beams to break the spans approximately into thirds. By maintaining the 24’ width and by making sure that none of the spans between beams grew, we were able to reuse the beams and roof deck without needing to order any additional material.

The modular wall system’s ability to be rearranged and reconfigured for a new application, or disassembled and re-installed in a new location, is one of this customer’s favorite features. They’ve purchased a number of modular buildings from us over the years and most of them have been rearranged or relocated at least once.

Using Modular Building Materials to Consolidate the Engineering Department out onto the Shop Floor

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Exterior view of the completed 140’ long modular office complex

By Derick @ A-Mezz

Most commonly, when someone contacts us looking for a modular building system, they’re looking to put in something small — a 12’ x 12’ office, or a 16’ x 24’ conference room, for example. That is not always the case, though. Modular wall systems are rather versatile and can be used for much larger projects as well. These photos are all of one such project we put together for a happy customer here in Cleveland, Ohio.

Interior view down the hallway of offices as the project is being installed

The customer wanted to move their engineering department down onto the plant floor. Working alongside the customer, we came up with a design for a 140’ x 35’6” building system to go on the plant floor partially underneath a decommissioned bridge crane. At one end we had eight 12’ x 12’ offices, and a 12’ x 14’ three walled “war room”.

Interior view of the 62’ span open area along with one of the existing bridge crane columns before it was enclosed

The central section of the building was kept largely open to be set up for desk spaces. Typically, a corrugated roof deck is used to form a membrane that helps support the wall system. With the 62’ x 35’6” clear span across the room, we decided to support the wall panels and grid ceiling with a 4’ on center joist system that tied everything back to the support structure of the former bridge crane. The bridge crane columns were also boxed in with traditional construction to give the room a clean, finished appearance.

Finished and furnished 30’x18’ conference room.

On the far end of the building we made a 30’ x 18’ conference room. The rest of the area was left connected to the main central region to be used for printers and supplies.

Primary entrance to the finished office complex .

Heading into the project, one of the customer’s main concerns was to isolate their engineers from the noise of the production floor. The panels of the A-Wall 200 wall system we used offer an STC rating of 32. The internal tongue and groove connection between panels offers a uniform barrier of protection throughout the system. The areas where sound has an easier time of getting through on a wall system are usually the doors and windows. In order to help prevent this we put heavy-duty EPDM gaskets and mechanical sweeps on all the exterior doors, and used laminated glass for all the exterior windows. To further help isolate the building from the sounds of production around it, we placed a foam tape underneath the base track of the wall system, and added rolls of insulation above the acoustical grid ceiling. After everything was put together, we had another happy customer with a quiet engineering department located right in the center of their production floor.

Acoustic Wall Panels Control Machine Shop Noise

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By Victor @ A-Mezz

Solid relocatable acoustic wall panels to control compressor noise

In this photo an Ohio bearing repair shop needed a separation between a machining operation and an assembly area. The customer wanted a portable rigid wall system that could provide flexibility and be relocated as the shop layout was most likely going to change to accommodate a new piece and an expansion to their services and equipment. The shop area was conditioned and space was already tight, so they needed to keep everything as open as possible. Windows were added for visual safety. You may wonder “Why use a rigid panel and not an industrial curtain?” We offered both options and, as it turned out, the minimal cost savings of a vinyl curtain system did not negate the additional benefits of solid acoustic wall panels. Five months later the area was rearranged and these panels are being used in the new location of the customer’s shop.

Wall panels to separate machine shop and control noise

The back wall in the photo to the right shows a view of this acoustical partition system that surrounds two rather noisy compressors. This area enclosing the air compressors does include a ceiling system with sound control insulation. All the windows are laminated tempered safety glass. Laminated glass provides superior acoustic benefits over standard tempered safety glass.

When the partition curtain wall was later relocated, the panels comprising the compressor room remained in their original location.

This is only one example of several modular wall systems this customer has in this facility. Three other modular enclosures serve as clean rooms and process control rooms, and two others are being used as production control and shop supervisors’ offices.