When Should I Do Crack Repairs Before Or After Etching?
Just about every concrete floor will have a crack or two in it. So what is the best way to repair them and when should you do it. Let’s start with surface cracks. These are tiny stress cracks that are at the surface and can be filled in with our Military Epoxy or our Garage Epoxy. Next are Hairline cracks, even though they are relatively small cracks they often run down through the whole depth of the slab. Trying to fill these in with the epoxy may or may not work so best to fill them in to be safe. We would recommend you use our Instant Crack Repair. It’s a two part epoxy you mix together and putty knife it into cracks and divots. Then you can paint right over it. It won’t crack or chip out either. You would do this repair after your floor has been grinded or acid etched.
Next would be cracks lets say from 1/4″ and up. We would recommend you use the Crack & Joint Compound. This product gets mix with Playground sand in about a 50 lbs sand to 1 gallon of mixed liquids. The idea is to add the sand to the mixed epoxy until it gets to a grout consistency. Then you can apply it to cracks, divots, holes or pitted areas. This product should be applied before you do your prep work.
For large areas that are pitted or cracked you can use the Skim Coat Patch or one of the Self Leveling Slurries on our concrete floor repair page. Just keep in mind when using any skim coat or floor slurry it’s strongly recommended to use a primer. The reason being is that the patched areas will absorb the epoxy paint at a different rate than the concrete. This can result in color variations if you don’t use a primer. In the case of resurfacing the entire floor with a slurry. The slurry will absorb more than the concrete yielding much less coverage if you don’t prime first.
If you have concerns about prepping your floor correctly please give us a call and one of our flooring experts will be glad to help you out.