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  • #6311
    V8 Staff
    Keymaster

    The floor in the old paint booth in our shop had about 50 years of paint caked on it, so we decided it was time to take the plunge and resurface the floor.

    Our goals were to remove the old flaking layers of paint & dust and to lay down a solvent-resistant coating that could be cleaned with a pressure washer or solvents like laquer thinner.

    We also wanted to brighten the room, so a light-colored coating was in order.

    We have 2 booths on-location, a Blowtherm down-draft baking booth in the body shop next door that is owned by the same party that owns our building, and the internal cross-draft room you see here. I say “room” because that’s what we like about this one… it’s not the highest-tech booth in the world, but it is HUGE and lets us shoot a bunch of parts at once, or be able to step away from a car to see a stripe layout, etc.

    We scraped and pressure washed some of the old layers off, but we determined that we needed something a little more aggressive.

    We rented a concrete floor grinder and went to town. This is not really a fun job, and we spent an entire day doing it. We were not concerned with a perfectly smooth surface like you’d see in a fancy hotel, we just wanted to mow off the years of build-up and get down to a uniform layer of concrete to which we could apply some new coating.

    The process involves mowing down the layer, then vacuuming up the dust. The machine has a built-in vacuum, but an added shop vac helped tremendously. We also wore plenty of dust protection, as nobody knows what kind of dust we could have been breathing! Add to that earplugs and eye protection along with full-coverage clothing and you’ve got the uniform down.

    Kevin Oeste

    #6312
    V8 Staff
    Keymaster

    Once the dust was vacuumed up, we gave the room a bath with muriatic acid to etch the concrete, rinsed it away with water, and let the room dry overnight. We were able to run the booth fans overnight to catch dust and dry quicker.

    We chose a product called Rocksolid, which is a Polycuramine coating that they claim is 20 times stronger than epoxy. We had met a representative from Rocksolid at the PRI show in Indy, and he gave us the spiel about other paint booths protected by this stuff. It seemed legit, so we bought enough at our local Lowes to cover our booth.

    We didn’t require the fancy-schmantz flake or custom colors, but you can do all that with this coating.

    One thing I have to stress is the mixture of the product… they claim you mix the multiple parts of the chemical in their industrial strength ziplock bag and then pour it out of the bag. I tried this twice, and twice the bag ripped and poured a giant puddle on the floor that I had to roll out quickly in a panic for fear of it setting up and hardening too quickly. Not cool. They claimed that warm temperatures and high humidity accelerate the process, so keep the mix out of contact with ambient air until it is poured.

    Our day was about 90 degrees and 80% humidity, probably the wrong time to do this, but I elected to mix it all up in a bucket and try my luck. It was better than pouring it all over my shoes again. This seemed to work perfectly, and we had plenty of work time to lay it out.

    A little goes a long way.

    We chose the light gray color for brightness. You can see the swirlies in the floor because we didn’t get a perfectly smooth surface, but it was smooth enough for us. We wanted it smooth enough for water to drain out, but that’s about it.

    This looks darker than reality because of the flouro lights throwing off the iphone camera.

    We sprinkled some glass-bead traction enhancer to the floor to make it safer, and extra to the ramp area in our space, it helps immensely.

    We were quite happy with the final result, even though we had some issues with the messy bag-tearing situations. The coating is impervious to any chemical we’ve spilled on it, and it does not care about cars rolling on it at all. Good stuff.

    The only downside is that we paint so many black primers and suspension parts, etc., that the color is now dark gray again. We have pressure washed the floor many many times, and I supposed if we got down and scrubbed it with paint remover, it would return to its light-gray color again. We always clean the loose stuff and dust out of the room and our paint jobs have far less dust in them than before this process. We often time mask the floor when needed as well.

    Since then, we’ve stripped and painted the walls and replaced all the bulbs and ballasts with T6 units, and the place is much brighter.

    This coating has been in place well over a year, and it’s something we’d recommend.

    Kevin Oeste

    #6345
    Mike Clarke
    Keymaster

    Now, this is the type of product endorsement I can get behind. Actual use from a real deal business with real world results. Perfect.

    Sent from my SM-T217S using Tapatalk

    #6351
    Frank Szymkowski
    Participant

    lot of work but its well worth it now. Looks excellent

    #179018
    V8 Staff
    Keymaster

    FYI, this is still holding up, 6 years later.

    Kevin Oeste

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