Polished concrete floors are strong, durable, and beautiful when given proper finishes. Stained, stamped, or polished concrete surfaces can give your home a magnificent look. But before making any finishes on a concrete surface, you’ll need to ensure that it’s well-prepared for you to get the best results.
For instance, you have to clean the surface and perform invisible concrete crack repair work before polishing your concrete surface. This post highlights five essential things that you should do before polishing your concrete surfaces.
Perform Visible and Invisible Concrete Crack Repair
Many concrete structures are durable when built well. These structures can last for over a century, but they sometimes get damaged and they’ll need concrete crack repair as time passes. For your concrete to look flawless, you’ll need to do visible and invisible concrete crack repair to get a surface that is a close match to the rest of the perfect surface.
Moving cracks, which are partly invisible, can be a severe problem during polishing. As such, you have to root them out using a V-grooved diamond blade before cleaning them with a metal brush. You can vacuum the remaining dust and use an appropriate sealant before polishing.
You can use a cement mixture to patch spalls, divots, and shallow surface chips. If the damages to the concrete surface are minor, skim-coat material can work as a useful overlay for the surface. For damages that only measure around one-fourth of an inch, it’s ideal to use a self-leveling overlay and hydraulic or anchoring cement.
If you aren’t well-versed with the invisible concrete crack repair process, you should contact a professional who understands the concrete repair processes.
Do Joint Repairs
When dealing with concrete, there are three main kinds of joints that you’ll often encounter. The construction joints are located between slab pours. The isolation joints separate concrete slabs from other construction components such as drainpipes or columns. These are joints created before the pouring of the concrete.
Contraction joints are set on wet concrete to prevent random cracks that result from shrinkage or expansion. You should clean and fill these joints with a concrete filler or sealant. Repairing such joints reduces the chances of spalls and chipping at the joint edges. The process also improves the look of the finish.
Clean the Surface of the Concrete
If the concrete surface you need to polish is old or stained, then you’ll need to clean it up and remove the stains. Oil stains are the worst because they hamper the permeation of concrete dyes, stains, and densifiers.
Find the Hardness of Your Concrete Surface
To choose the ideal diamond tooling bond and type of grit to use in polishing, you have to first determine the hardness of your concrete surface. The scratch test kit is a perfect tool for measuring the relative hardness of your concrete surface.
This kit has color-coded picks with two ends, which have eight points that are forged using different materials. The materials represent the Moh’s hardness scale, which ranges from two to nine. To test the surface, scratch it with picks of varying hardness. For instance, if the number five pick can scratch the concrete, but the number four pick doesn’t scratch the same surface, then the hardness of your concrete is 4.5.
The results of the test will help you in choosing the most cost-effective and efficient tool for polishing. Selecting the ideal tool prevents unnecessary wear to your devices.
Choose the Ideal Tooling And Equipment.
When polishing, you have to select a bond that is the opposite of the hardness of your concrete. You should polish hard concrete with soft bonds because it’s easy to expose them. But if you’re polishing soft concrete, then you’ll need hard bonds. A proper choice ensures that no wear and tear will burn through the tools more quickly than necessary.
If you do visible and invisible concrete crack repair and adhere to all these recommendations before starting to polish your concrete, then you’re likely to end up with the best concrete finish that will give you a sustainable polished concrete floor.