This warehouse floor is a good example of a worst case scenario concrete floor. This facility handles vegetable oils and has substantial oil saturation in the concrete. It also had two failing overlays which were hiding about 100 steel studs that had to be cut down. The overlays were likely used to level the floor which was very wavy due to poor concrete installation.

When we began our work, I would have rated this floor a 2 out of 10 with 10 being the best floor. We used a Rossi Abrasives surface preparation system beginning with GS2 dual PCD scrapers to remove the overlays followed by 35SS grinding tools.  A lot of extra time was spent taking down high areas to minimize the waviness of the concrete floor.

The concrete floor looked great once the surface preparation was completed. A substantial amount of patching and repairs were required before the coatings could be applied.

The next stage was the coating application; this was a two coat system with an epoxy base coat and polyaspartic top coat. We applied an oil tolerant epoxy primer as the base coat but unfortunately it failed and had to be ground off. It’s quite rare for this to happen but it does happen and needs to be fully removed.

Starting again we applied a different oil tolerant epoxy base coat which cured without issue. We sanded the base coat and applied a polyaspartic top coat which would provide the durability required for the heavy traffic and oil exposure. This facility handles oil filled totes by forklift so epoxy alone would not stand up well.

The final result was okay but not perfect because of the waviness of the concrete floor. The owner did not feel that pouring a new overlay was a good investment so it was beyond our control.

Overall the new floor was a huge improvement from the starting point, we elevated the floor to a 7/10 which is a reasonable level for a warehouse floor.

There are always valuable lessons learned in tough jobs so it was a good addition to our knowledge base.

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