I'll post pics in the coming days, but I just wanted to add into this thread that so far I have been very pleased/impressed with the Rustoleum Professional grade product I purchased at Lowes in a six gallon bucket ($98.00). I think I may have gotten a little heavy with the flakes(I had purchased two kits and then used both kit's worth of flakes on the second coat) but that is user error so I can't hold it against them. The first coat was soaked up by the ground down concrete, so much so that I actually needed a tad bit more, just enough to cover about the size of a five gallon bucket. The first coat looked really thin when it cured over a 16hr period. It needed a second coat without a doubt. After the second coat things look great so far (knock on wood). It took about 1.5-2hrs to put each coat down including the 30min wait time after mixing. Speaking of mixing I used a power mixer blade that went in my corded drill and it did a great job of mixing the paint.
I will also add that the Blastrac/Sawtrac equipment at the HomeDepot rental let me down. There was a problem with the large walk behind 10" grinder's blade/grinding wheel. Apparently the manufacture sent a ton of these out in an improper balance so they were recalled and HomeDepot failed to get a new blade in even though they turned the old one back in over a month ago. According the Blastrac rep they area available for order but someone in the Atlanta ordering office for HomeDepot dropped the ball and has failed to order the replacements and then ship them to the stores. So...my next choice was the Blastrac shot blaster. The problem with the one at the Home Depot rental was it failed to recirculate the shot. After covering five feet or so, all of the shot would be piled up in the blast zone and the machine would come to a hault. It appeared that what ever releases the shot/regulates the shot was not working properly(the control valve if I recall correctly). Not only did the problem cause the shot to stop movement of the unit and did not feed the system to remove the surface, it also caused an intial dumping that left some pretty good divits in my garage floor. Thankfully I had started right at the edge where I was planing to have some shelving up so I can cover up the divits. After trying for two hours to get the unit working properly by refering to the manual and using some common sense testing, I called Home Depot Rental. Only one person was working that knew anything about them but she was so busy she told me she would call me back in five minutes. 30mins later I called her back because she never called me. She got the Blastrac rep on the second line and everything he could think of I had already tried.
So, after draging the shot blaster back to Home Depot I was left with the 7" hand grinder. Holly **** what a job. It wasn't really all that strenuous on my arms despite the fact that your swinging at 25# assembly that is pulling a vacume as well via a large two motored four stage dry shop vac, but man was it killer for the knees and back. You are croutched over working the surface and 550 sq feet with two layers of material to grind off is a enough to make you take two days.
I had what appeared to be a standard grey Bear paint on the top of the floor but under it was some white substance that appeared to have been dripped or spilled on the surface and was then painted over. The garage has a textured ceiling and I suspsect that the white material was from the texturing. It was some tuff stuff to grind thorugh.
To cover the 550' I ended up renting the grinder for two days ($52.00 a day with the shop vac), went through one Gold diamond blade($49.00) and two Blue diamond blades(%69.00 each). Given that I did not want to piss the new neighbor hood off I only ran the grinder and vac from about 10am-4pm the first day I had it and 10am-230pm the second day I had it.
The funny thing was this, the garage is 550 sq feet. The gold blade is rated by blastrac for 400-500 sq feet. The blue blade is rated by blastrac for 800-100 sq feet. So simply based on blade wear I must have ground 2000-2500 sq feet worth of surface.
What ever you do...if you take this project on, do yourself favor and avoid having to use a hand held grinder.
Wes
