Bob:
Good morning. This is Bob and Ryan with Surface Renew, and we’ve had some customers that have asked us how to polish conctete floors Little Rock. So we thought we’d run through a quick “how to” on how to polish concrete floors Little Rock. Before we start though, the first best thing to do is define what a polished concrete floor is. There’s some confusion about that and an actual diamond polished concrete floor. Is there a certain definition in terms of what’s considered a polished concrete floor or is it just running a buffer over it?
Ryan:
No, it’s the mechanically polishing a concrete slab for use as a finished floor. You’re mechanically polishing it by moving up certain grits using a different resin bond diamonds or metals
Bob:
In generally a 400 resin is considered a polished concrete floor by definition or higher, correct?
Ryan:
Yep. That’s when you’re, when you get to the 400 grit is when you’re actually closing off the slab, you kind of start closing it off at 200, but at 400, you’re definitely have the S the slab, the cap of the slab is what they call it closed.
Bob:
And the big advantage that you have there on a polished concrete floor, as opposed to just putting sealer on a floor or rolling seal around a floor, or just basically running a some kind of sander over the floor to try to make it look good, is that you’ve truly sealed the pores in the concrete finish, which makes it much more stain resistant and much easier to clean over time. Next thing I want to talk about are what are some of the steps basically? So how do we start on just our, I say our typical you know, run of the mill, polished, concrete, a new slab on how do we take that up to a polished concrete floor?
Ryan:
We do first, we do mainly it’s about 80% wet polish, what we do and our process we’d dry grind at the end, but what we do, we assess this at once we assess the slab we polish with step one is with 50, with 50 hybrid diamonds. It’s a resin bond with copper metal shavings in it, instead of diamond grit, we’ll open up the slab with fifties, and that opens the floor to allow us to get the cream off the top and gets us down to the sand. The sand and cream is what should polish them together. Once we make a pass over the entire floor with fifties, we moved to 100 grit diamonds, and that is still a hybrid diamond at that time, and has less copper in it and more of the diamond and impregnated into the resin bond. Once we make a pass with the one hundreds, we go to two hundreds and two hundreds are generally 100% resin bond, which means it’s just as diamonds in the resin.
Ryan:
It could be real diamonds is shape, or what do you call them chips or diamonds, or it can be the manmade Cole carbon type of diamond. Most of the ones we buy are manmade diamonds, but it’s a, we make a pass to hundreds and it’s just like, I like to tell people, it’s just like, when you’re sanding wood, you worked from a low grit, like like a 20, 40 grit sandpaper. We start with a 50 diamond and we work our way up. And when we say diamonds, these are the little three inch pucks that they’re bought the same size as a hockey puck. If you will. They’re about three inches around about anywhere from a quarter of an inch up to one inch thick, depending on what kind of diamonds you source. But once we do two hundreds, we move on to 400.
Ryan:
If you’re going to do color is when we do the 200 stage, we’ll apply color, then we’ll densify the slab. And intensifiers a whole nother thing we can talk about later, we’ll add color. Then we densify. And then once it densify or dries, we run four hundreds and eight hundreds. We generally stop at at 800 grit diamonds because beyond that, the naked eye cannot tell the shine variance on the floor. You need to use a calibrator that tells you what the reflectivity of the Flores versus light versus holes. It’s a whole scientific process. So we generally stop at 800 grip. And then we put on a sealer, either a penetrating sealer or a or a topical sealer. It’s not a topical like a sacrificial, but it does sit more on top to protect the floor. Then we run a high-speed furnisher that gets the either or the two sealers you pick. We run a barn usher over it to get to see their hot, and it pushes it down into the concrete, fusing it with the concrete. So it’s not a topical seven sacrificial coating on polished concrete floors that you can’t scrape up with a razorblade. It is literally part of the cost.
Bob:
So to answer the question, how to polish concrete floors Little Rock, we’re basically saying it’s a very specialized process that needs a combination of the right equipment and the right chemicals along with knowledge and experience to properly polish, a concrete floor, as opposed to just rolling a sealer over your floor. And the big reason that we’re proponents of a polished floor is its durability and longevity versus any other coding or flow curve. And you’d want to put on your floor, it’s more durable than ceramic tiles, any epoxy flooring any kind of rolled color and a stain sealer on polished concrete
Ryan:
Wax, or VCT tiles. Yup. Far
Bob:
Superior in longevity and durability. Some of the keys in, and how to polish a concrete floor up we talked about are, you know, using the, the right diamonds and the right resins in the right steps, but also how to polish concrete floors Little Rock involves using the right chemicals to properly densify the concrete slab, which is a key part of the chemical process in polishing a concrete floor.
Ryan:
And then the densifier actually makes the of the concrete harder and allows you to polish it better. It’s a, it’s a crystallization process, which fills not all the pores and with majority of the pores in the concrete. And we like to put it on in the afternoon and let it sit overnight. And the crystals actually, it’s microscopic crystals that grow on the top of the concrete and down about a 16th of an inch into the concrete. And then that’s what we’re polishing is that part of the concrete.
Bob:
So if you have any more questions on how to polish concrete floors Little Rock feel free to give Surface Renew a call at (501) 920-9326.