Yearly Archives: 2018

What To Do If You Miss A Spot On Your Garage Floor Coating?

 in Uncategorized by

So you’re apply your garage floor coating or commercial epoxy flooring and all is going well until you get a few sections along in the application and you look back and suddenly you see to your horror that you have missed a spot!. First thing is not to panic and what every you do do not walk back on the wet epoxy to fix it.

Here’s what you can and should do. This is where those spoke soles come in handy! If you have them and it hasn’t been to long since you noticed the missed spot that walk over to the spot with the spikes and fix. This goes for a missed spot of the color flakes. You can simple add more flakes to a bald spot. If you haven’t noticed it till after you’re completely done and you don’t have spikes. Just wait for the floor to dry and go over and patch it. In the case of wanting to add more flakes you need to apply a very thin layer of epoxy for the flakes to stick onto.

Then apply the topcoat but stay clear of the patched area if you just did it. Don’t wait for the patch to dry since once you go past 24 hrs between coats you need to sand the surface to rough it up. Just stay about 6″ away from the patch spot. Once the rest of the next coat dries you can simply fill in the patched area,

A very common occurrence is missing a spot with the clear topcoat. Since these topcoats are Gin clear it’s easy to do while you’re applying them. This is no issue at all. After the topcoat dries just very lightly sand the epoxy and perimeter clear coat with 100 grit. Then brush on some clear to fill in. To help avoid missing spots dry to have someone looking at the floor from an angle while you are rolling on the clear.

So in sum, don’t panic, having spikes is a good idea for emergency puposes and for applying the flake into the epoxy, they make getting an even pattern much easier, don’t let the main part of the floor dry for over 24 hrs before apply next layer and if you have a more serious issue just contact us and one of our expert support guys or gals will get you back on the right track.

WHY AND WHEN TO USE AN EPOXY FLOORING PRIMER

 in Application Tips by

Sometimes a floor needs an update. It could be that wood is splintering or concrete is cracking. you can reclaim original flooring but if there’s a lot of damage, sometimes new flooring is the answer. It’s easy to find the flooring you want, especially when you can find affordable flooring on sites like reallycheapfloors.com. However, different flooring needs to have different primers. We get asked so many times about using a primer that it deserves a blog post. The majority of Garage Floor installations do not require a primer if you are using a high-quality epoxy. There are times however that a primer is recommended. If your floor has concrete that is old it may be in poor condition from being uncoated for many years. Road salts may have started to break it down. You may have pitted areas, a primer will help in filling in the pitted areas. Your floor may have become what we call chalky or dusty, this is where no matter how much you clean the floor there always seems to be concrete dust or chalk on it when you rub your hand over it. This is where a primer comes into play. It will penetrate into your concrete and bind up the chalky loose top layer of the floor. You should use a shop vac for your floor, thoroughly to get down to the solid part of the floor as best as possible before applying the primer.

You may be doing your floor and your square footage is slightly above the standard kit coverage. Your choice is to buy an additional Add On Half Kit or you can purchase the Epoxy Flooring Primer that will do several things. It will penetrate into the slab deeper which provides better adhesion and it will extend the coverage of the epoxy by up to 20% since the epoxy is now going over a sealed surface. So in addition to giving you another layer of epoxy for a thicker floor finish(thicker is always better) it can also save you some money.

You may have a floor that you previously coated with another epoxy that is failing. If it’s not a Home Improvement Store epoxy you can possibly still save it by coating directly over it with one of our epoxy kits. But first you must sand the floor to clean it and rough it up and then put down a coating of our Proprietary Bonding Primer. This lets our coating stick to any other kind of coating. This is not to be confused with the Epoxy Flooring Primer above which is strictly for bare concrete. The Bonding Primer can be used to go over Wood Floors or Molding prior to applying an epoxy coating to them. Or you may have a plastic or metal drain cover you want to coat with the epoxy to make the floor look really nice. Epoxies don’t stick will to metal or plastic, Bonding Primer solves that issue. However, if you’re wanting epoxy for wooden flooring options, you could look into some of the best wood epoxy coatings available to you.

You may be the type of person who has large toys in their Garage or Man Cave or uses their space as a work shop. Or you may be the type that just wants the strongest, toughest epoxy flooring there is. This where you need and want a primer. If you have a heavy tonnage vehicle like a large Motor Home that can weigh up to 50,000lbs, you definitely want a primer. Any heavy vehicle that will have twisting or turning tires with standstill dead weight on them requires the highest amount of adhesion to avoid the epoxy being literally ripped off the floor. This is where a high performance primer is needed. Our primers are really high quality epoxies that don’t have as much Solids in them as are actual floor epoxies do, to allow them to soak a little more into the slab. They lock deep into the slab and provide a surface that the Epoxy to actually chemically bonds into thus making an inseparable layer of primer and epoxy. If you stopped at our Primer layer you would still have a better coating on your floor than the vast majority of other actual epoxy coatings you can purchase.

So there are many uses and times when you need and should use a primer and often times when you don’t. If you are unsure of whether you should or shouldn’t simply give us a call-866-532-3979 or email us at info@armorgarage.com

HOW HARD IS IT TO DO METALLIC EPOXY VS TRADITIONAL EPOXY SYSTEMS?

 in Epoxy Flooring by

We have been getting an increasing amount of callers asking about doing a metallic finish epoxy floor. The first thing we ask is if they have any experience in doing this sort of floor. The answer is always no and that they saw it on YouTube and that it looked fairly easy to do. This is when we tell them it’s not as easy as it looks. It looks easy cause the person doing it most likely does it for a living or has done it many times before. Most of the companies selling metallic epoxy state on their websites or will tell you that their products are not that easy to work with if they’re honest. They say this at the same time as stating that there is no wrong way to do it. While that statement is true because the finish is random, there is definitely good and bad results and sometimes even very bad results. So while it looks like you are just splashing different colors on the floor it really takes skill and experience to get the ratios and the spreading of each color right for it to actually come out looking good rather than an eye sore.

Doing metallic floors are much more labor intensive. You need to grind the floor usually and do a black base coat, then sand it and apply a seal coat and then splash the colors into the seal coat and then sand that when it dries and then you need to apply a topcoat. Some systems use a primer then a black base coat that you sand and then metallic paint that you sand and then a topcoat. Anyway you look at it, it’s a lot more work and the results most likely will not look like what you were expecting. There is skill and artistic talent involved in getting the looks you see on the internet. With traditional epoxy there is no skill level or artistic talent required. Just some good old fashioned elbow grease to clean the floor properly and then just apply the epoxy similar to regular paint. We package our epoxy in turnkey systems to make easy and simple for you to install a complete epoxy flooring job. There is some measuring and mixing involved so that takes a little more consideration than just sticking your roller into the roller tray and rolling the paint on like a semi gloss. But it’s way simpler to do than metallic and 99.999 times out of 100 you are going to be happy with the results. Check out our Epoxy Floor Systems on our Home Page and choose the one that fits your application best or give us a call for some expert advise on which to use.

If you’re truly set on doing metallic, give us a call and we can price our metallic system out for you with a disclaimer that we are not responsible for the results. Also just to let you know that in the New York Tri-State area whenever we get a Metallic job we sub it out to a professional who does only metallic floors. We don’t even let our own professional installers do it! You should take that accordingly.