Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Break the silence
After starting about ten separate blog entries and not managing to finish them, I've decided that I need to narrow my scope somewhat. Not every entry I make here needs to be a novel, or explore some deep philosophical issue.
So instead I'll just detail one of the sixty trillion jobs I managed to finish around the house this year. I think the actual number of jobs I finished might be slightly lower than that, but that number feels accurate. I choose to write about this project becuase it was one of those jobs that forced me out to Google as a starting point, which is usually a sign of a world of hurt a-comin'. I think in the modern world you can almost directly measure the commonality and/or obscurity of information by counting the google hits against it, and by that measure information on what I was trying to do turned out to be pretty obscure.
What I was trying to do was to cover my garage floor with an epoxy paint. It sure sounded simple. Then for a long time I thought it wasn't simple at all. In the fullness of time and experience on the matter, however, I've come back around to thinking it really was simple all along, but not nearly as simple (as in "synonym for stupid") as me.
I chose to use a product manufactured by Quikrete, called simply "epoxy garage floor coating". But even as I brought the stuff home, I knew that it was going to be trouble. For one, I knew that there was a concrete sealer on the garage floor, and I suspected that it was going to be a problem. Having used epoxy paints before I knew that they have a hard time sticking to smooth surfaces. Sure enough, the instructions for the product noted that if the concrete was sealed, the sealer would have to be removed. Other than saying that this might involve sanding, that was pretty much all the advice they had to offer. This, incidentally, is the place where even Google shrugged and said "Sorry, pal. You'll have to figure this one out yourself". Attempts to research how to take a sealer off concrete came back with a big echo.
I can now say with some authority that contemporary concrete sealers are absolute miracles of modern chemistry. The stuff on my floor laughed at all the nasty solvents I threw at it. The ones that did anything at all actually increased the sealer's effectiveness. It resisted hours of sanding with a 17-inch power floor buffer and 20-grit sandpaper (which, if you've never seen it, looks like sharp gravel glued to paper). It was only slightly abraded when I combined the power sanding with a mixture of TSP, muriatic acid, and goof-off. That mixture was so toxic that I swear I can still smell it, and it rendered the floor so slippery that the sander was moving me across the floor rather than the other way around. When all of these measures failed to completely remove the sealer on the concrete, I actually got down on hands and knees with an angle grinder and a concrete wheel and ground out the remaining spots of sealer by hand.
I only proceeded with this insanity on a small part of the garage. It was so traumatic that I decided to go with a different approach for the rest of the area. I purchased a wire-brush attachment for the same type of rotary sander and just set about getting the surface of the sealer roughed up a little with the etching chemical that was supplied with the epoxy paint. The idea behind this operation was to simply make the epoxy paint stick to the sealer, becuase I know for damn sure that the sealer is stuck to the concrete. After painting there was no way to tell the coverage on the area I freaked out about so badly from the area where I stopped giving a crap. It's been several weeks and everything is still okay. It's always instructive when something you spent two weeks struggling over turns out to have been for nothing.
For anyone who's interested I purchased the wire brush attachment from an Ebay merchant called Farwest Supply, and they did a pretty good job and had reasonable prices on what turned out to be a hard-to-find item.
So instead I'll just detail one of the sixty trillion jobs I managed to finish around the house this year. I think the actual number of jobs I finished might be slightly lower than that, but that number feels accurate. I choose to write about this project becuase it was one of those jobs that forced me out to Google as a starting point, which is usually a sign of a world of hurt a-comin'. I think in the modern world you can almost directly measure the commonality and/or obscurity of information by counting the google hits against it, and by that measure information on what I was trying to do turned out to be pretty obscure.
What I was trying to do was to cover my garage floor with an epoxy paint. It sure sounded simple. Then for a long time I thought it wasn't simple at all. In the fullness of time and experience on the matter, however, I've come back around to thinking it really was simple all along, but not nearly as simple (as in "synonym for stupid") as me.
I chose to use a product manufactured by Quikrete, called simply "epoxy garage floor coating". But even as I brought the stuff home, I knew that it was going to be trouble. For one, I knew that there was a concrete sealer on the garage floor, and I suspected that it was going to be a problem. Having used epoxy paints before I knew that they have a hard time sticking to smooth surfaces. Sure enough, the instructions for the product noted that if the concrete was sealed, the sealer would have to be removed. Other than saying that this might involve sanding, that was pretty much all the advice they had to offer. This, incidentally, is the place where even Google shrugged and said "Sorry, pal. You'll have to figure this one out yourself". Attempts to research how to take a sealer off concrete came back with a big echo.
I can now say with some authority that contemporary concrete sealers are absolute miracles of modern chemistry. The stuff on my floor laughed at all the nasty solvents I threw at it. The ones that did anything at all actually increased the sealer's effectiveness. It resisted hours of sanding with a 17-inch power floor buffer and 20-grit sandpaper (which, if you've never seen it, looks like sharp gravel glued to paper). It was only slightly abraded when I combined the power sanding with a mixture of TSP, muriatic acid, and goof-off. That mixture was so toxic that I swear I can still smell it, and it rendered the floor so slippery that the sander was moving me across the floor rather than the other way around. When all of these measures failed to completely remove the sealer on the concrete, I actually got down on hands and knees with an angle grinder and a concrete wheel and ground out the remaining spots of sealer by hand.
I only proceeded with this insanity on a small part of the garage. It was so traumatic that I decided to go with a different approach for the rest of the area. I purchased a wire-brush attachment for the same type of rotary sander and just set about getting the surface of the sealer roughed up a little with the etching chemical that was supplied with the epoxy paint. The idea behind this operation was to simply make the epoxy paint stick to the sealer, becuase I know for damn sure that the sealer is stuck to the concrete. After painting there was no way to tell the coverage on the area I freaked out about so badly from the area where I stopped giving a crap. It's been several weeks and everything is still okay. It's always instructive when something you spent two weeks struggling over turns out to have been for nothing.
For anyone who's interested I purchased the wire brush attachment from an Ebay merchant called Farwest Supply, and they did a pretty good job and had reasonable prices on what turned out to be a hard-to-find item.
The nearly-impossible floor
