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Archive for 2011


Acrylic Floor Paint

Acrylic Floor Paint – Not Really Paint, but a Resin With Pigmented Acrylics

Two men paint gray acrylic on stairs leading from the floor above.Man with roller in blue overalls paints flooring with acrylics.

Not that anyone wishes to argue semantics, especially about paint, however acrylic floor paint is somewhat of a misnomer. You see, acrylic floor paint is really not paint at all, but rather it is more a floor coating. Why bother to make the distinction, you are thinking? Because a coating is something that goes deeper than the surface meaning of paint which by all rights merely covers the surface. A coating goes deeper than just paints since it is actually a covering, much like the difference it would make to you to be covered by a blanket if it is windy, as opposed to being covered by a coloring agent of some kind.

In most cases, since we are speaking of acrylic floor paint, as opposed to a floor coating, a floor coating will improve the properties of the surface of the floor, which in the flooring business is called the substrate. So, the scratch resistance, wear resistance, corrosion resistance, wetability, adhesion, and definitely the appearance of the substrate will change with a floor coating. With acrylic floor paint, basically only the appearance will change. Thus, when someone calls a floor coating just plain and simple acrylic floor paint, it does not cover all the bases, anymore than a roller skate is a vehicle, although most vehicles have four wheels.

One of the very best acrylic floor coatings that one can put on a floor is known as Silikal. You see,Silikal goes the furthest from merely being acrylic floor paint, than any other floor product can. It is truly a floor covering. You may be wondering why this is so?

First, Silikal is put down in such a way as to create an instant bond with the substrate. Perhaps if you create a mental picture of a hot English muffin receiving a healthy swipe of soft butter upon it, that will help you to understand the analogy. Just as the butter creeps into each and every nook and cranny of that hot English muffin without any impediment at all, so does Silikal enter the concrete that it is laid upon. It does this not because the concrete is hot, of course, but because it is enhanced MMA, and that’s what MMA behaves like.

 

A Floor Covering Made of Stone | Protection + Location + Color Selection

Great Places For Coverings Made of Stones – Protecting That Beautiful Stone – Color Selection & Stone Floor Covering Installers



Razor back red covering for floor made of stones

Long ago; perhaps in the Stone Age, floors were made out of stone because they had to be. Today, just the opposite is true, and if someone has a floor covering made of stone, chances are they are in the upper echelon of home ownership or perhaps it is an attorney’s office, or a very high end hotel or motel.

There truly is an enormous choice of exotic natural floor covering made of stone. There is the deep earth sophistication of sandstone, the magnificent patina of onyx, the opulent hue of marble, the expressive tones of slate, and the exceedingly flourishing patterns of granite.

Chances are if it is a high-end casino, for example, then they might have gone for a floor covering made of stone – travertine stone! Travertine is actually in the limestone family, and is found in Italy, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico. It communicates affluence, good taste and success. The biggest problem with travertine though is the fact that it is a porous stone, and thus may easily stain. Later in this article we will cover what to do to protect travertine.

Black pearl stone floor covering made of rocks
A floor covering made of stone today is the epitome of grace and refinement, thus we have come far from the days of the Stone Age, but with a few additions and fine-tuning. Ordinarily the stones listed above also need to be set into some form of grout-like material, and in turn need to be covered with some kind of sealant, regardless of the kind of stone utilized. Otherwise the grout gets dirty, and since grout allows water to seep through it, what happens is that dirty water goes under the stone, making for a terrible problem. Should that occur there may easily be mold under that lovely stone or even bacteria, as well as fungus, and what happens next is the emission of foul odors, not to mention the degradation that occurs from simply having moisture pass through the grout time and time again!

In order to save that lovely floor; including travertine floors, a floor covering made of stone needs to be thoroughly sealed over, and there is no better product than Silikal. Silikal can install a sealant that will be completely clear so that it will have that beautiful shine that your interior decorator was speaking of, yet it will be completely protected. Clear silicone sealers made by Silikal are the highest grade possible, and the sealers never need to be replaced. They go on quickly over your floor covering made of stone, and yet they can cure in exactly one short hour or less. Your business need not shut down for days as with other sealers that take far longer to cure.

 

Strong Flooring Bond Uncompromised

A Strong Floor Bond Can Mean A Lifetime of Benefits for Your Business

Chef prepares food in kitchen with floor bonded concrete made strong.Workers in a meet distribution plant work diligently over a strong bonded floor.

OK, I agree the word strong means a plethora of different meanings. For example many people think that concrete is strong. Well it is, but consider why they put steel in poured concrete buildings? That’s because concrete is really not that strong? Now, if you look up strong flooring bond, you’re in for quite a surprise. What comes out of the search engines is strong flooring bond mats that are utilized during wrestling, judo and karate, or in other words martial arts.

In the flooring business, most of those people think of MMA when they think of a strong flooring bond. MMA stands for Methyl Methacrylates, and if you are seeking flooring that will create a very strong bond, that’s what you want. However, a company by the name of Silikal understood only too well that MMA had a few problems associated with it. First of all, it makes pinholes, and worst of all it undergoes chemical absorption which will eventually cause that bond to actually separate from the substrate, which usually is concrete.

Thus, Silikal put its best scientists onto this problem and asked them to solve it. The scientists came up with MMA which they had mixed with a secret ingredient, and that then became Silikal’s “enhanced” MMA. That’s the only wording they use for whatever they did to it, but it certainly made an impression on the eventual users of Silikal.

You see, then they found that this strange creation called Silikal would actually continue to be whole or monolithic for the complete life of the building it was installed into. In addition, because there were never any pinholes in it, Silikal became the only product that totally prevented dirt, bacteria, germs and many other nasties to locate and hide in the substrate. Consider for example a food processing plant, or a meat rendering plant. The waste products are washed down into the substrate by the water they utilize to cleanse the meat, such as turkeys for example. That water settles in the substrate, and next thing you know the plant is shut down for having pathogens in their meat, any meat products, whole poultry, or even assorted poultry products processed by that establishment! The establishment or processing plant makes worldwide news, and it’s not good news at all!

Now, you may not have a meat packing plant, and you may not handle any poultry, but you might be a restaurant that needs to have clean floors. You might be a veterinary clinic that performs operations on pets, or you may be a hospital that operates on humans. The point is that no matter what business you are in, keeping your establishment clean, and your workers healthy is your job.

Without Silikal and its enhanced MMA, you may have mechanics that call in sick due to unexplained coughs. The reason may very well be that the dust raised by foot traffic, cars and hand trucks going over untreated concrete may be raising dust that settles in your worker’s lungs. This is why even if all you have is a warehouse; you will want to use Silikal for your strong flooring bond. Check around, and you’ll find that there’s nothing like Silikal!

 

Seal Coating Concrete: Sealers & Coatings – Concretes Sealed Right

Choosing the Proper Seal Coating for Your Concrete Floor

Contractors work diligently applying a concrete seal coating to a warehouse floor.Large factory seal coating flooring system shines beneath the light.

There are a great number of ways to seal a floor. For instance there’s epoxy floor coatings, epoxy resin coatings and seemingly hundreds more. Sealed and polished concrete floors have become so much more popular. They are currently in use in residential/office lofts, retail spaces and museums. All of those spaces look absolutely charming with some sort of concrete seal coating on their floors. In addition, seal coating will protect the floor, any kind of floor, from those in warehouses and basements, to garages. Thus, things like weathering and corrosion will no longer harm the floors, or at least that’s the goal anyway.

If you look at seal coating concrete you will undoubtedly find that many companies are suggesting a product that contains the highest quality epoxy, along with urethane, and a product called methyl methacrylate that they refer to as MMA. Chances are that is the highest quality product they can suggest, and that will go on quickly, dry super fast, and it will undoubtedly present you with a gorgeous seamless look. Thus your commercial kitchen flooring, aircraft hangar flooring, garage flooring, hospital floors or heavy duty industrial flooring will look absolutely great, but then comes the million-dollar question – how long will it last?

Ah, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare used to word it! This is why Silikal is best. They too use the highest quality product out there, but there is one very important difference, Silikal has “enhanced” MMA, and Silikal is the only company to have that particular secret in its concrete seal coatings. Because it is enhanced MMA, once applied and bonding is taking place, it becomes a part of the floor beneath it. Chances are that your floor will look as if it was just put down, no matter the punishment it is given, and no matter where it was put down.

The “where” is important, for if you put it down outdoors, it can take all manner of weather and best yet it is totally UV resistant. If you put it down in an abnormally hot location, next to huge commercial ovens for example, the heat will do nothing to it. Put it down in a laboratory, and drop all manner of alkalis, acids, tinctures, salts and grease on it, and nothing but nothing gets through it as it is not only seamless flooring system, it is totally chemical resistant as well!

Commercial ovens do not harm it, but how about inside a freezer? No problem whatsoever, the Silikal seal coating will not only set up within one hour in a freezer, it is made to cure in low temperatures! Thus, Silikal seal coating is found in the greater majority of the meat processing industry. That means all manner of meat cutting and packaging plants, sausage plants, as well as various slaughterhouses have Silikal floors. Only Silikal can take those extreme temperatures and the impact of the heavy loads found in freezers.

The thing is that there are seal coatings and then there are simply sealers. With Silikal the bond is complete, there will be zero pinhole entry under the sealed floor. There will be no wear ever. Other types of floor coverings will eventually wear down, but Silikal will last longer than the floor it’s put upon!

 

What Is Monolithic Floor Coating You Ask?

Look No further for Answers To What Monolithic Floor Coating Is

Large warehouse with storage racks and a monolithic flooring depicted.Industrial stainless steel holding tanks rest on a monolithic floor coating system.

You may have heard this term bandied about but, perhaps you are not sure what monolithic floor coating refers to, or what it means. The word monolithic was first used to describe a geological feature such as a monolith; for example a mountain might be associated with the word. Archeologists use it to describe columns saying that there was a monolithic column found in Greece, for instance, when they meant that the column had been made all from one stone only. In today’s vocabulary it means that it is something that is unbroken, one piece, and therefore unfragmented.

Now you understand better that a monolithic floor coating will have no seams and thus no joints. Unlike say a tile floor that is in many pieces with grout in the middle of each adjoining tile, tile floors are definitely not monolithic floors.

Floors that are not monolithic can allow dirty water to seep between it and the substrate, a substrate meaning what’s under the floor or in some construction dictionaries define it as a structurally stable material. In many cases, the substrate is actually poured concrete, but imagine what nasty germination can take place in that instance? First, there would be germs, bacteria, even fungus, potentially followed by growing mold. Chances are that the floor’s condition would occasion strange appalling and ghastly odors. Let’s assume for instance that perhaps our non-monolithic floor is in a restaurant where spills are part of the business. How is one to clean a floor that sucks up spills?

The bacterial count of food waste alone is downright staggering, yet many restaurants utilize those old-fashioned safety rubber mats. Those need to be scrupulously cleaned then hung out to dry every night, and the floor then needs to be mopped with strong chemicals to try to stop the germination that very likely will still be taking place on the substrate.

Now you can see and understand the importance of a monolithic floor coating, it’s one that will not allow materials of any kind to penetrate it. Now, Silikal is the finest monolithic floor coating available anywhere in the world. The reason is that they have a exceedingly secret ingredient that their own scientists have created especially for Silikal. It is called MMA which is what is always in monolithic floor coatings, however because of the secret ingredient, their formula is what they call “enhanced” MMA. MMA, by the way, is Mixed Martial Arts to lots of martial arts fans, but in flooring it stands for Methyl Methacrylates, thus a mouthful that’s been reduced to MMA.

The “enhanced” portion of Silikal’s enhanced MMA enables a business to even drive heavy forklifts on the new floor with only one hour of “curing” which is the technical word used to mean “harden.” Now, if you don’t have forklifts in your business, perhaps you have cars that you need to drive into the mechanics, or perhaps you have a huge amount of foot traffic, all of which can use the new floor just one hour after it has been laid by the highly qualified technically trained workers.

What Silikal’s enhanced MMA does is to stop the product from making pinholes, which unfortunately MMA that has not been enhanced will make. In addition MMA that is not Silikal’s enhanced MMA will also go through chemical absorption that will also cause it to separate from the substrate. Only Silikal flooring will remain whole or monolithic for the entire life of the building.