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Concrete Decor - Index

Concrete Decor - Concrete Decor Magazine, The Journal for Decorative Concrete - Index

and from starting with sodium-based
densifi ers to having sodium, potassium
and lithium-based options — some
as silicates, some as siliconates and
some as blends. Diamond technology is
progressing so quickly that it is almost
impossible to keep up with names and
technologies. With dyes for polished
concrete joining integral colors, dry
shake hardeners and acid stains, we’re
not just plain vanilla any more, but can
provide a rainbow of colors that rival
Mother Nature.
Evolution
How has the industry changed in
the past 10 years?
Polishing concrete, not unlike
other new industries, begged, borrowed
and stole from others in its infancy.
Equipment came from the surface
prep, stone restoration and cleaning
industries, and as one can imagine,
nothing was a perfect fi t. The size of
the equipment was not adequate, the
head speed and head pressures were
not optimum, diamonds wore out
too fast or glazed over, and one had
no real choice of “wet or dry.” The
hurdles never seemed insurmountable
because we weren’t smart enough to
know better. My fi rst polishing project
was a 100-square-foot test area in my
own warehouse, carried out with a 17inch
swing machine from my stone
restoration business, using marble
diamonds. On my second project,
fi xing a dry-shake fl oor with dirt and
footprints, I saw no reason to change
my equipment. After all, we were only
talking a few thousand square feet.
Well, we did such a great job that the
general contractor initiated a change
order for the rest of the project, an
additional 100,000-plus square feet of
a new prison. As you can imagine, one
17-inch swing machine wasn’t going
to cut it, so we bought new equipment
to do the job right: another 17-inch
CCG swing machine, a 10-inch CCG
for under the prison bunks that were
bolted on the wall of the cells, two Alto
28-inch walk-behind scrubbers, and
a used 50-inch Advance ride-on. Each
piece of equipment was then outfi tted
with custom plates and diamonds.
We thought that the several months
This fl oor was polished with autoscrubbers and swing machines. Only the cream was polished.
it took to complete the job was pretty
impressive! How naive. Creativity was
a necessity — in fact, it wasn’t unusual
for operators of swing machines to get
better head pressure by placing sand
bags on the machine, or better yet, to
have their wife sit on the motor. You
did what you had to. Nothing is the
same today as it was yesterday. There is
a complete industry today that did not
exist in the late ’90s.
In looking at equipment, fi rst
consider equipment from the surface
preparation industry — designed to
level the fl oor, it had the weight and
head pressure to cut through just about
anything. Then consider equipment
from the stone industry — here was
equipment to polish and grind materials
that were always relatively fl at to begin
with. And last, you had equipment from
the cleaning industry — it had size and
ride-on capability, but lacked torque and
head pressure to grind the concrete.
VIC International fi rst brought
the HTC grinders over from Sweden
in 1993 for surface preparation, with
SASE Equipment following with the
Diamatic in 1997. Not until 1999 or
2000 were the equipment and chemical
manufacturers working toward creation
of the polished concrete industry as it
stands today. While these machines had
the ability to produce level fl oors, they
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