The soil there is pretty sandy. I live in a moraine (sp?) so my yard is relatively sandy and there are TONS of stones. Perhaps I should have put some insulation down. I never thought about that... too late now!
Monday 10/26
E-pox on Both My Garages! (I spilled
)
So the big project this weekend was to get the epoxy down, not pictured here is the 1" gas pipe that we ran from the northeast corner of my house to the southwest corner of my garage (basically as far as physically possible). Why do I need 1" pipe you ask? 2 heaters and homebrewing.
On with the epoxy! We acidized the surface, even though it's probably unnecessary after the diamond grinding. We squeegee'd it out and rinsed the surface 2-3 times then blew it out with a leaf blower to reduce the drying time.
The drying time really put us behind. We had four fans to assist with the drying but, as we figured out, we had to dry the 4" blocks COMPLETELY or the water would wick into the concrete pad.
In order to keep the whole garage enclosed, yet be able to epoxy the lip of the floor we covered the 8' garage door with a plastic sheet, wedged old trim pieces into the J-channel and weighted it down with square pavers.
We "cut in" the epoxy (gray) with a small brush prior to squeegeeing (sp?) it out. We established a pretty good division of labor. I was cutting in, rollering and flaking and my Dad was mixing, squeegeeing and doing what cutting in I couldn't finish.
I played with a couple different strategies for flaking the floor, I found the best was to take a small amount and throw it up against the ceiling (or insulation, in my case).
The clear coat didn't get finished until early this morning (woke up at 4 AM for that) and it was really the only disappointment of the job. The disappointment wasn't anything to do with the product, rather with our strategy. Since it was getting pretty cold and on the lower end of the epoxy's curing temperature range we employed a kerosine heater. Unfortunately, we placed it too close to the epoxy floor and the soot that it apparently produces coated a section of the floor. This affected cure time (it was still sticky this morning, yes I left a footprint) and it also caused some discoloration in the clearcoat. In the following picture you can see where the soot has mixed into the clearcoat where it was squeegeed out from the center.
My current plan is to leave it and see how the affected section of floor holds up. If it starts falling apart I'll fix it, otherwise I'll say "good enough."
