Floor prep before epoxy

[youinreverse]

Hey all, I just bought a house a few months ago and I want to coat the garage floor before we get stuff accumulating in the garage. Right now I'm leaning towards ArmorPoxy. The garage is roughly 19" wide by 26" deep. The house was built in 1997. It looks like it's had a coating of paint some time in the past, so I'm planning on renting a grinder to prep the floor before the epoxy. My question is, what to do about the cracks/joints. I have about 25 feet worth of small cracks. Most of them are small enough that I think it would be difficult to fill. There are a couple places where some larger chunks have chipped out, but all in all, they're pretty small cracks. What sort of prep work do I need to do to take care of these?





The second question is about this large joint running down the center of the garage. It's almost two inches wide and about an inch deep. It runs from the front of the garage all the way to the back. I'll be using this garage as a work space, so I'd like to be able to wheel a creeper or stool around the garage without wheels getting caught in it. From the reading I've done I think it shouldn't be filled with epoxy, but instead be filled after the epoxy coating is done. What product is recommended to fill this?

 

[LegacyIndustrial]

Any unfilled void/crack will telegraph through your coating and will be a likely place for a failure to start.
That joint is a coin-toss. You can fill or not, your choice.

Those cracks need to be chased out.

 

[FJ4FUN]

Grind the floor, chase the cracks with an angle grinder/diamond cup wheel, prime with BondTite 1101, fill cracks (except troweled joint) with IntegraFlex 1921, apply either our solid color LiquaTile 1143 or, LiquaTile 1184 with flakes and EnduraShield hybrid-urethane clear. Then Tape off troweled joint and fill with more IntegraFlex 1921 or any other quality joint filler like Sika.

 

[Armorpoxy]

Hi
We would recommend you fill the cracks with our Crack Repair Epoxy putty. No liquid coating will do much to 'fix' a floor so repairs need to be done first, or they will telegraph through the coating. The exception to this is if you do a 'full fleck broadcast' the flecks do a great job to hide issues with a floor.

See this helpful bulletin https://armorpoxy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Surface-Prep-Memo-ArmorPoxy.docx.pdf

As always, feel free to contact us directly at below for guidance or assistance.

 

[Armorpoxy]

No washing alone absolutely is inadequate. You should grind the floor even a Diamabrush would be 20x better then pressure washing. At the minimum if you wash you should etch with diluted muriatic acid but for a commercial application we would not recommend this.