The recoat argument comes back to you at closeout
The frame was open through a wet winter, there's rust bloom on the columns, and now the question is whether shop primer was supposed to hold up that long.
Your product stays outdoors, unfinished, for as long as somebody else's schedule takes to close the building, and it gets judged against a spec written for a shorter window. No other package is held to a durability standard set by the delay of the trade that follows it. The cost comes back months after your job closed, which is why it usually disappears into overhead with no cost code open to catch it.
The size of it
A touch up or recoat mobilization inside an enclosed building runs with lifts and a supervisor, and it gets priced at closeout against retention that hasn't been released. Absorbed into overhead, it raises the rate every other job in the shop has to absorb, and no report tells you so.
Shop primer protects steel between fabrication and enclosure, and that's the whole job it was specified to do. When the envelope slips and the frame is exposed through a season, surface rust appears and the conversation turns into a claim that your coating failed. The same seam opens with spray applied fireproofing, where SFRM adhesion depends on the primer, so an adhesion and cohesion test failure at closeout gets argued between you and the fireproofer with neither party clearly responsible. By then the building is enclosed, so the fix takes lifts, supervision, and a crew working inside finished space.
Three moves, in order
Step 03: Overhead calculation
What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using.
What else costs structural steel contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What structural steel owners ask
Who pays to recoat shop primer that rusted before enclosure?
The frame was open through a wet winter, there's rust bloom on the columns, and now the question is whether shop primer was supposed to hold up that long.
What does it cost?
A touch up or recoat mobilization inside an enclosed building runs with lifts and a supervisor, and it gets priced at closeout against retention that hasn't been released. Absorbed into overhead, it raises the rate every other job in the shop has to absorb, and no report tells you so.
What do I do first?
Photograph and date the frame at erection completion, close ups of primed surfaces included, and send the set to the GC with a note on the exposure duration that primer covers.
What are structural steel contractors supposed to be making?
Structural steel runs 23% gross margin, 15% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 1 point above it. The CFOS target is 11.5%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using. It comes from chapter 3 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for structural steel contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.