Surface Preparation Guides

Prep is four gates, not one job: sound, profiled, clean and dry. The full sequence, how to pick a method, and the tests that prove the slab is ready.

The ICRI scale from 1 to 10, what it measures, and why too much profile is as wrong as too little once the film build is thin.

One cuts, one fractures. Where each wins, why a blasted floor still needs a grinder, and why the two have different cost shapes rather than different prices.

One cuts, and you can watch it work. The other is a reaction you cannot see finish, with two opposite failures that look the same on a dry floor.

Hard concrete takes a soft bond and soft concrete takes a hard bond. The rule inverts because the bond has to supply whatever wear the slab does not.

Whether it has to come off at all, the three ways a coating behaves when you attack it, and why the floor somebody installed properly is the expensive one.

The water drop test answers one question well and misses one treatment entirely. A slab can drink water and still be treated, and bead water with nothing on it.

Most of it is not a separate operation. The question is whether the treatment sits above the depth your profile pass was cutting to anyway, and one of the four cannot be removed at all.

The film on nearly every new slab was applied by somebody meeting a curing requirement, not being careless. Why the word seal matters more than the word cure, and the one conversation that prevents it.

The covering that came up names the material stuck to the slab. Two of them smear and blind tooling, one is a cement and grinds, and they want opposite sets.

Degreasers differ by how deep they reach, not by how strong they are. One of them drives the oil further in, and the water drop test cannot tell you whether any of them worked.

A blaster is set up rather than driven. Three settings decide the profile, a test strip is the only way to confirm it, and it drifts shallower all day as the abrasive breaks down.

A vacuum is rated at its own inlet with no hose on it. What reaches the shroud is less, and it falls further all day as the filter loads.

One flat rate multiplied by your pass count gets you a planning number fast, plus what actually drives that rate up or down on site.

Metal bonds cut, resin bonds refine. What each grit is for, why exposure and sheen are two separate decisions, and what each step up the ladder adds in hours.

Length, width, and depth explained, and why measuring at the wrong point leaves you short mid-repair.

Bags come from area, average depth and bag yield. Only one of those is printed on anything, and the other two decide the order.