Eiffel Trading 101: Concrete Formwork Care and Maintenance

Tips & Advice

Would you run your truck without oil? If you don’t clean and oil your formwork after each use, you are going to damage your formwork and eventually render it useless. It’s not a surprise that clean formwork translates into beautiful concrete. Here are some easy formwork maintenance tips to help keep the concrete you’re pouring looking beautiful:

  1. Clean the face of the form after each concrete pour. It sounds simple and it is, but you need to clean the face immediately after removing it from the wall. You can use a burlap bag and water to clean the forms while the concrete is still green.

  2. Oil your formwork! This coincides with the opening statement of this post. By oiling your formwork before and after each use, you are going to keep your formwork looking new for years. The cost of the form oil is a small maintenance cost when compared to buying new forms.

  3. If you have steel formwork, use a passive form oil. Passive form oil, when compared to reactive form oil, will leave less dust on your concrete formwork. It’s important to follow step number 1, whether you are using passive or reactive form oil.

  4. When applying form oil, you want to make sure you only apply a thin layer. Less is more. If you apply too much form oil, you will leave a layer of dust on the forms after the concrete is poured which will increase the amount of formwork cleaning time.

If you regularly maintain your concrete formwork, you will have a revenue producing asset for many years. Whether you own or are renting formwork, you should always make sure the forms are properly cleaned and maintained after each concrete pour. If you are in the market to purchase used concrete formwork, our inventory of concrete formwork can be found here. In addition, you can advertise your concrete formwork for sale by clicking here. Please feel free to give us a call if you have any questions at 1-800-541-7998 or email sales@eiffeltrading.com.

Cheers,

Andrew

Andrew Norman is one of the co-founders of Eiffel Trading. His background is in Heavy-Civil and Marine Construction in Project Management and Procurement. He has worked on many projects pouring thousands of yards of concrete with EFCO, DOKA and SYMONS formwork.