Old Parliament House, Canberra Australia

Old Parliament House in Canberra served as the "temporary" seat of Australia's Federal Government from its opening by the Duke of York (later King George VI) in 1927 until the opening of the new building on the hill behind it in 1988.

The building was built of brick, cement rendered internally and externally, with some of the render being up to 30 mm thick and in up to three layers. During the building's conservation for its new use as a parliamentary museum, it was found that much of this render had lost adhesion and was "drummy", yet it was worth preserving as a record of the techniques used in its application and the history of painting contained on its surface. The project managers were particularly concerned to ensure that the render could not fall on users of the building.

Standard techniques using various proprietary adhesive injection techniques were tried on a test panel from which the render was then cut to reveal that none were adequate. Two problems were apparent:

• the adhesive resins were absorbed into the bricks or the render, but often did not bridge the gap;
• the loss of adhesion in the render was at different layer boundaries which meant that a large area of "drummy" render did not have one large void but separate voids at different levels.

Eventually CINTEC came up with the option of pinning the render in place with the use of a grid of 75 mm long CINTEC RAC anchors. The anchors were inserted through the render into the underlying brickwork, but left protruding at the surface so that the sock-encapsulated grout bound the full depth of the render layers: the CINTEC "pins" were trimmed after hardening and the hole repaired.

Work is continuing as the building is conserved.

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