What Are The Steps To Polishing Concrete?
What Are The Steps To Polishing Concrete?
Here are the steps on how to polish the concrete;
Collect The Required Tools
The instruments used in concrete polishing differ depending on the surface you want to work on. It is recommended that you test the hardness of the concrete beforehand to ensure that you use the correct tool.
If the concrete is really hard, you may need exceptionally soft diamond-bonded abrasives to smooth the surface. If it’s also quite soft, you’ll need really harsh diamond abrasives to smooth it out.
Filling Holes And Sealing Cracks
Clean the surface and inspect it for cracks and holes in the concrete. Fill any gaps and then grind them to make the surface flat. Examine any expansion joints. If any exist, clean, fix and fill them.
Grinding Concrete
If any adhesives were put on the concrete to fix, for example, carpets, grinding the concrete with a 16- or 20-, 30- or 40-, 60- or 80-, OR 120- grit diamond bonded metals will be necessary.
Then, using very soft diamonds, grind very hard concrete. Use the soft diamonds to grind hard concrete and medium-hard concrete.
If the floor is porous, it should be grouted first. To get a delicate sheen after grouting, mill the concrete with diamonds of 120-grit or higher.
Remove Scratches From The Surfaces.
After you’ve finished grinding, use 30- or 50-grit resin pads to remove any scratches left by the metal abrasives used throughout the process.
The 30- or 50-grit resin pads will also aid in the transition from metal diamonds to resin diamonds.
After you’ve finished with the transition diamonds, smooth the surfaces using 50- or 100-grit resin pads before finishing with 200-grit.
Apply Densification And Stains
After using the last 200-grit resin pads and higher, apply the densifiers and stains. In this case, the purpose of adding densifiers is to harden the concrete.
The removal of the concrete layer during grinding and honing makes the surface weaker and more prone to failure.
Ideally, you should apply the stains first, then wait for them to dry (if you used concrete stain), and then apply the concrete densifier.
If required, apply another layer of densifier to make the concrete even tougher.
After the densifier and stains have completely dried, smooth the surface using 400-grit pads. Continue until the floor takes on a shiny sheen.
Surface Polishing
This is the last step. After polishing the floor using 400-grit diamond pads, conclude by polishing the whole surface with 800-, 1500-, and 3000-grit resin pads to finish the polishing process.
If you like a medium shine, simply stop polishing after using the 800-grit and 1500-grit resin pads.
If you want a higher sheen, use the 3000-grit resins pads to finish the polishing process. They will provide you with a high shine with a mirror-like surface that appears just like glass.
Completion
This is an optional step. It is, nevertheless, required if you want the shine to be shinier. This phase will include polishing pads on a burnisher to give the concrete a high sheen.
What Is The Most Effective Way To Polish Concrete?
You can make your concrete sparkle in two ways: You may polish your concrete using either the dry or wet polishing methods.
These strategies each have their own set of advantages. On the other hand, the dry approach is more popular since it is more ecologically friendly, convenient, and faster.
Furthermore, most people consider the wet approach to be labour-intensive since it generates large volumes of slurry, which must be properly disposed of to prevent environmental problems.
The fundamental distinction between both approaches is that water is used in wet polishing to remove dust, and cool diamond abrasives are used to sand the floor.
However, water is not required for the dry polishing procedure. Instead, the floor polisher you’ll be utilizing here will be linked to a dust containment system that will suck up all of the dust produced by this operation.
If the concrete surface you want to polish already has a substance or underlayment, such as carpet or epoxy, you will need to remove these materials before you begin polishing the surface.
This is required since the adhesives used to adhere various materials, such as carpet to concrete, would make the surfaces uneven and difficult to handle.
Mechanical floor prep equipment equipped with abrasive metal diamonds will be required to make removing the existing materials from the concrete more manageable.
If you want to expose the aggregate in this concrete, you need to remove the burnish from the first pour.
