Two New World Records Set in 2011 Golden Trowel Competition

Two new records for concrete floor flatness/levelness have been set by Keystone Concrete Placement and GNP Construtora

Two new world records are among the eight Golden Trowels and one Silver
Trowel to be presented at the annual Golden Trowel awards ceremony at the World of
Concrete.
The awards will be presented on Thursday, January 26, 2012.

Presented by The Face Companies of Norfolk, Virginia, Golden Trowels are given annually in
recognition of the flattest and most level floor slabs placed in the world.

George Garber and Robert Costa will be presented with the 2011 Sam Award, for their decades of contributions to the concrete flooring industry and especially for their key role in the early development of flat floor technology.

The two world records for concrete floor flatness/levelness have been set for Unshored Elevated Decks and for Narrow Strip construction.

Keystone Concrete Placement, from Georgetown, Texas, built an Unshored Elevated Slab for the Harmony School of Political Science in Austin, Texas, achieving an overall FF of 61.78. It is difficult to achieve FF Numbers over 60 on any one unshored elevated slab,
much less doing this over and over for a whole project. This is Keystone's 4th Golden Trowel award and its second world record.

GNP Construtora, of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, produced a distribution center using narrow strip construction of 89,000 square feet, measuring an incredible FF 183.6 / FL 100.1. GNP is no stranger to the Golden Trowel Awards: this is its 3rd Golden Trowel, and, like Keystone, this is its second world record.

This is the 8th Golden Trowel in eight years awarded to a company from Brazil.
It is interesting to note that each of these world records was achieved in a different category from the company's first world record.

Birdwell Builders of Lakeland FL, has won its 18th and 19th Golden Trowels, giving it the
third highest number of Golden Trowels won by a single contractor, behind Fricks Floor
Systems (25 Golden Trowels) and Ace/Avant Concrete Floors (21 Golden Trowels).

Including this year's winners, a total of 256 Golden Trowels have been awarded to 102
different floor contractors.

This year's "Sam" Golden Trowel will be awarded to George Garber and Robert Costa,
international concrete floor consultants since the 1970s, who conceived the key inventions that resulted in the development of the Dipstick Profiler. The Dipstick provided the first practical means of measuring the ACI/ASTM F-Number System.

"This is the 30th anniversary of the Dipstick," observed Face Companies CEO Brad Face. "It
was first displayed at the World of Concrete in 1982," Brad Face continued. "George and Robert were part of a very small team that worked for years to solve the problem of how best to measure F-Numbers. The solution couldn't be some complicated laboratory device. It had to work in the field… in the real world. Looking back, their contributions provided the two technological innovations that made the Dipstick work. And since, in practical terms, the Dipstick made the F-Number System work, it's hard to overstate their contribution to the concrete flooring industry."

See all the winners of the 2011 Golden Trowel Competition.

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