Flooring Headache

[The Wolff]

My concrete guy poured my 30 x 50 slab 8-months ago about two hours prior to us having 3" of rain. He power troweled it for hours and covered it the best he could but I wound up with a smooth slab but a very soft top cap--you could dig a groove into it with a key alone!

It was dusting very bad and I planned on using densifier and sealer but the manufacturer wasn't positive that would cure my issues. I decided to hire a professional.....who hit it with densifier, ground the surface and hit it with densifier again. He then coated it with two coats of Sherwin Williams Armorshield Rexthane. Although the surface was now hard, the finish looked awful.

He agreed to make another repair and came out last week and hit it with epoxy. He obviously didn't want to spend much time and was done in less than two hours. There is epoxy all over the side metal edges of the building, bare spots near the edges and even a full epoxy hand print on the outside of the building by the service door. The worst issue is that after 4-days, it still has some tacky spots which leads me to believe that the epoxy wasn't prepared correctly!!

Any suggestions at this point? I have had this building up for almost 8-months and have yet to be able to use it. My thoughts are to fire this contractor, rent a machine myself and sand off the epoxy. Is this possible or do I have to chemically strip it?

I am also considering hitting the uncured areas with acetone and putting Racedeck or something similar over the surface??

 

[SolarColumbia]

Has the epoxy dried yet?

 

[The Wolff]

There are several areas that are still slightly sticky/tacky...small but still a problem.

 

[LegacyIndustrial]

Call Sunbelt. They have a commercial floor rental company in Orlando.
You want a big-boy to tackle this. May want PCD tooling to dig in.

 

[The Wolff]

After a "professional" epoxy install, I have several areas of epoxy that appear wrinkled for lack of better words. The wrinkles can be moved with a fingernail so they are obviously soft. My question is...can epoxy be spot repaired or does the whole area need to be removed and re-applied?

 

[woodee]

Sounds like the same issue I had which was the resin and hardener had spots that weren't mixed completely. Sorry to say but it will never harden. You'll need to scrape the soft spots, sand, and solvent wipe with xylol. You may be able to get away with spot repairs, but you'll probably have to re-coat the whole floor.

 

[The Wolff]

Sounds like the same issue I had which was the resin and hardener had spots that weren't mixed completely. Sorry to say but it will never harden. You'll need to scrape the soft spots, sand, and solvent wipe with xylol. You may be able to get away with spot repairs, but you'll probably have to re-coat the whole floor.

Did you repair the spots that gave you a problem? My floor is in 10 x 10 sections separated by the expansion cuts. If I recover a whole section, does the epoxy need to be completely stripped from that section or just sanded and cleaned before reapplication?
Thanks

 

[tommyoneil38]

It needs to dry completely.

 

[woodee]

This is the link to my thread that explains what I had to do. I didn't remove the good areas, just sanded and solvent wiped them, and it worked just fine. I did recoat the whole garage so it would look consistent. You could give it more time to see if it will cure, but mine was still soft/tacky after a few weeks so I knew it wasn't going to improve.

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=425666

 

[Armorpoxy]

Hi
You can sand of selectively areas that have not cured but caution that batches of epoxy color shades may not match so make sure to use same batch.

Soft and tacky spots come from the material not being properly mixed in the pails, normal from the bottom and sides of the buckets so good practice is to move your mixer all around the sides and bottom when mixing. Be careful not to mix at too high of rpm to avoid air bubbles.