Veterinarian Employe needs help

[drlebel]

Hi everyone, new to this site. Just wanted to get yalls opinion. so after hiring locally and never getting any good floor maintenance people i decided to hire my employee John to do my floors because he needs the extra money and likes to learn new things. Well Vets floors are darn difficult to get right because of the wear of dog nails. We once used a company called finishline floors to coat all our floors with some freaky nonbuffing urethane fortified finisher that did a great job for a year then it needed touching. the problem is that the company was not local and only came every 2 years and do not sell their product to use personally so it was not a good solution for us becasue of the off years. So we researched diff. products and finally purchased some of ladsllc product Dura for our VCT floors. We got everything ready and rented the low speed stripper machine and got to stripping and it would not work. Their must be 8-10 layers of wax plus the urethane fortified product on our floors and John spent 14 hours stripping with little success. We used a Franklin brand stripper form Toiletpaper world and then had to try Homes Depot with little luck. And yes we had a black stripping pad and were wetting it down properly and even used it at full strength. Any other ideas to help strip this floor.

Oh and 1 more question, I have high spots in the tile that burn usuing the high speed buffer- but to really activate my new Dura floor finish to resist the dog nails I know i have to hit it with the burnisher. Any tricks of the trade for my employee to help reduce these burn spots.

Thanks a million, this is all new to me and I just want to get hard clean floors that my employye can mantain with minimal hassle.

[Grizzly]

Well, I am old and cynical so I will try hard NOT to get into the hire a professional to do a professional job. I don't hire my employee to treat my dog. First, the urethane fortified finish is going to take a different stripper to break it down than you are going to find at a local Home Depot. You may have used a black pad , however, you must know that you CANNOT use stripper at full strength and expect it to work. It requires an addition of water to activate the emulsifiers in the solution. At most, I have mixed a stripper at a 1:4 ratio. How much dwell time did you allow the stripper to do its job and keep it wet on the floor. Some manufacturers' specs will say allow a dwell time of 11 minutes, I personally allow at least 6 minutes of dwell time. Purchase a professional product made for commercial use, the products from Home Depot ARE NOT made for professional use in my opinion but for the average every day homeowner , maybe trying to strip a floor.
As for the high spots on the floor your only recourse is to try and use a softer pad, possibly one without any natural fibres in it. Try a 3M 4100 white pad. It is for polishing but I have found it to be not as stiff as a jackaroo lite pad and doesn't burn the floor as easily on high spots.
No matter what you do, no floor finish is going to resist the scratching of dog nails. In fact, the harder the finish , the easier it is to be scratched as well as being more difficult to maintain. You should possibly be going with a softer finish and be on a regular maintenance program of quarterly scrub and recoats.
In fact, if you want to get a floor that will provide you minimum maintenance then you should be replacing the VCT with a porcelain to ceramic floor and have the grout sealed, or better yet a concrete floor and have it polished and impregnated.

;D
Bill

[logan5127]

Great reply Bill. I would also recommend buying scraper and lots of new blades. Lay down the stripper, wait a few minutes than go to scraping every inch. Repeat process until you can not scrape up any more .(Have several empty 5 gallon buckets around to pic up the loose finish. Than lay down more stripper and scrub it with the pad. Its hard. It takes a long time. It is nasty. So charge a lot more for these type jobs. As far as the high places , i train my employees to once they know where they are , the next time go around them. once you have burned a spot you can scrape backwards and take off most of the burn. Then just spot some finish on it.