shop-talk
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Painting floors

To: SGHT@aol.com
Subject: Re: Painting floors
From: Chris Heerschap <Heerschap@eng.kns.com>
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 1999 15:54:34 -0500
SGHT@aol.com wrote:
> As a new list member I am not sure if this has been discussed before.
> I am fixing up an old shop with approx. 8000 sq.ft. of grease/dirt on the
> floor. Have any of you had success cleaning and painting a cement floor after
> years of heavy use? If so, what did you use to clean and what kind of paint
> did you use?

Unfortunately I can't comment on the cleaning the floor question...
the floor in my garage was less than a year old when it received its
first coat of paint.

What I can offer is stay away from water based paints.  I've
repeatedly applied the Drylock garage floor paint only to have it
pulled up by tires after it rained and tires dries on the paint.  I
tried waxing the floors and putting stuff between the tires and the
paint.  Waxing kinda worked for a few weeks, putting stuff down worked
for the most part, but that's a pain in the butt.

Solution?  Non-water based paints.  I bought a Sears floor paint for
the basement (they didn't have the Drylock) and it stunk -- an
incredible amount.  Reading the label, it said "not for indoor use"--
OOPS.  However, I did use it on the garage, and it worked great.  I
never waxed the floor, and parked soaking wet cars on it until it
dried, and nothing has pulled up yet.  It's also a thinner paint than
the water-based stuff when it dries, meaning more of the concrete
texture is visible... which means more traction when it's wet.  I've
slipped a couple of times on the thicker, smoother water-based paint.

I can't speak of the two-part epoxy others have mentioned, and I
haven't bothered with the traction compound (kinda like fine sand
added to the paint) as I heard it reduces the durable life of the
paint.

Hope I haven't duplicated the other responses too much...


cmh
-- 
Chris Heerschap - UNIX Systems Mutilator/Postmaster
     mailto:Heerschap@kns.com

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>