Posted by Pieter on Friday, September 05, 2003 at 1:12AM :
In Reply to: OT garage floor paint posted by Tim on Tuesday, September 02, 2003 at 10:29PM :
Where i work, we bring in Sales Reps from time to time. One day we brought in a Sales guy from a very high profile Epoxy floor installer. They will not sell the commercial products to anyone period(installation is a very important factor for the life & durability of the product). In talking with him, and the reality that yeah it does cost upwards of $30/sq ft. His statement was that the floor finishes that you can get @ Lowes or Home Depot will work and perform an adequate job if you do two things. 1) prep the floor very thouroughly per the directions. Including Scrubbing with soap, an acid wash and another cleaning to get all the acid up. If there is acid under the floor system, it will come up. 2) you have to cure the floor Coating for as long as the directions say in the environment you are in.
It could be up to 30 days before you move back in or put any heavy loads(floor jacks)
or liquids(oil/gas) on the floor.
I am pretty sure the guy was honest. If I remember correctly he ended up using a shelf brand in his own garage. If your running a small shop then that would be a different story. For a normal garage where you may be rebuilding 1 truck from scratch and all the different processes involved, I would think it would be ok.
I had one garage where I was a renter and the garage floor was pitted up to 3/4" deep
in 4 corner's about the spacing of 4 tires on a car. When they parked their car and the water/salt would drip to the floor it would deteriorate the concrete.
Don't forget, concrete does have a finite life. Many of you are seeing interstates, overpasses all being rebuilt because the concrete has literally rotted away.
Just an opinion.
Pieter