Application Tips

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

Take a look at the finish of the concrete in the photo above, you’ll notice that it was very poorly finished, not to mention how dirty and oil stained it is. It’s full of swirl marks with large ridges and deep grooves. 99% of the time diamond grinding can take care of prepping a slab for an epoxy coating but in cases like this where you have deep swirl marks or the floor is pitted then the best solution is to shot blast. Shot blasting will clean out all the low spots while a grinder would ride along the top of the ridges and not get down into the valleys. You can do an aggressive grind followed by a couple of strong Muriatic acid washes if you have the time. The acid will clean out the low spots. We would do a final rinse with TSP powder to neutralize the slab back to the proper PH.

Shot blasting also removes oil stains better than grinding. The drawback of shot blasting is that it’s not a first time user friendly endeavor. You can very easily shot blast parts of the floor more than others resulting in a very uneven finish. Also when overlapping with the machine from one section to another you will get lawnmower lines that can show through your finished epoxy finish. This can happen with any epoxy coating since it’s caused by the fact as you overlap you are creating deeper shot indentations which will hold more epoxy. The more epoxy in those overlap strips have more pigment and therefore will be a shade darker. Most experienced shot blasters know how to avoid this but if you’ve never done it before it could be an issue. Notice the lines in the image below

So if your floor looks like the above and you want to shot blast it yourself we suggest you do either our Armor Granite or a full broadcast color flake installation. Full broadcast is simply covering 100% of the floor with color flakes, thus hiding all the floor’s imperfections. The Armor Granite is about a 90% coverage and in most cases will hide all the imperfections. We offer a full broadcast version of the Armor Chip garage epoxy kit.

We would strongly recommend the Armor Granite for two reasons, it’s much easier to install and it’s less expensive. It’s also a gorgeous finish. Full broadcast is not as easy as it looks. You need a tremendous amount of chips to start with and it’s very easy to end up with uneven blotches and lumps of the colored flakes.

Here’s a quick rundown of how to do a full broadcast. As you apply each section of the epoxy you walk in the epoxy with spike soles, don’t even think of doing this without spikes. We would suggest you have a good size box of flakes in one arm and with the other take large handfuls and toss them in the air in a left to right arc at about a 45 degree angle. Try to avoid throwing them straight up in the air. This will result in the dreaded lumps and blotches of flakes. You will do the floor one section at a time until complete.

Once the epoxy has dried you will need a good floor scraper such as the one in this photo. Notice how the floor is fully covered with flakes.

With the scraper you will remove all the loose flakes, the flakes sticking up and hopefully any lumps you have created. Once fully scraped down you need to vacuum the floor with a shop vac. If you still see some spots not to your liking, you can hit them with some 80 grit sandpaper to smooth them out some more.

Next you will now need to apply the topcoat and you will have to do two coats since all those flakes create millions of nooks and crannies. Do one coat and let dry, apply second coat with 24 hours with a nonslip additive for traction. Let dry and now you have a full broadcast epoxy floor.

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.