Diamond polishing is one of the most common methods used to get a shiny glass-like surface. It uses industrial diamonds to smooth, grind, and ultimately polish the surface. The grit you use determines the level of sheen you'll get on your floors. The finer the abrasive grit, the better.
Sealing concrete is a necessity: It keeps your floors clean, glossy and stain-resistant. Regularly applying a protective coating is vital to preventing chips, cracks and dirt buildup.
To ensure an easy pour and a smooth, impact-resistant surface for either outdoor or indoor meals, look for a concrete mix with additives that boost flowability and give the concrete high compressive strength, such as Quikrete Countertop Mix.
Screeds
Screeds come in a variety of sizes and can be a specific tool (also called straight edges or bump cutters), or can be simple flat pieces of dimensional lumber. The purpose of a screed is to smooth concrete after it has been moved into place by scraping away any excess from the slab surface.
While concrete is being poured, a screed is used to smooth concrete and pull the excess off the back of the form. Depending on the size of your pour you can use a wooden screed board or a power screed. Utilizing vibratory screeds will achieve the best results, while saving you time and back fatigue.
To achieve a high-gloss finish on concrete, you can either polish the surface with the appropriate diamond tooling or you can use a quality high-gloss concrete sealer.
High-Gloss are Ideal for Low-Maintenance Areas
For example, Hi-Gloss Sealer is a specially formulated concrete sealant meant for factory and other commercial concrete flooring where the high-gloss finish is a necessity due to its low-maintenance requirements.
Sealant and Epoxy Finish. A sealant can help protect concrete flooring from cracking. For a more hardened solution, try an epoxy coating. It creates a protective coating over concrete floors providing a shiny high-gloss surface and shields them from scratches and abrasives.
Although the terms cement and concrete often are used interchangeably, cement is actually an ingredient of concrete. Concrete is a mixture of aggregates and paste. The aggregates are sand and gravel or crushed stone; the paste is water and portland cement.
As we noted earlier, concrete sealers produce a very smooth surface on top of the concrete once it has fully cured, which gives your driveway valuable resistance to water, oil, and stains.
Trowel finish is the most common and popular finish of concrete used for major types of applications. After the concrete is laid in the formwork and leveled, the trowel is used to smooth and fine-level the surface of concrete. Fig 1: Trowel Finished Concrete. Trowels are available in both manual and mechanical types.
Acrylic is best for decorative, high-gloss, and color-enhancing applications. Concrete floors in basements, garages, and shops take a lot of abuse over time. Either water-based or solvent-based acrylic will provide a high degree of protection, but solvent-based usually lasts longer.
'The best way to ensure a good finish with gloss paint is to first prepare the surface well,' says Homes & Gardens Editor in Chief Lucy Searle. 'Any dents in the surface should be filled and sanded, then finished with a fine sandpaper; the surface should be flat and even so that bumps and lumps don't show up.
Once the concrete has lost its sheen, smooth the concrete surface using a wood float in an arching motion. NOTE: use a stiff-bristle broom to create a non-slip broom finish (all broom strokes should be made in the same direction).
Description. Glazes are a water based coloring treatment for use on cured concrete. They achieve the desired appearance with nano sized pigment particles that penetrate deeply into the concrete surface. The carrier reacts with the concrete to lock in the particles.
The process is fairly straightforward, but it does require plenty of physical labor and time. You must clean and patch the surface, grind it smooth with several passes of a concrete grinder, buff it to bring out the shine, and apply a sealer to protect your work.
Glazes are an easy to way to change or enhance the look of your concrete, using a water-based carrier with nano sized pigment particles that penetrate deeply into the concrete surface. These water based stains provide a broad color spectrum for full color treatments, or subtle tinting to hardened concrete.
Since cement lacks any natural bonding agents, newly-poured concrete won't naturally bond to the existing slab. You'll need to either use a bonding agent to adhere the two layers together or use an unbonded overlay method. Condition-affected life span: Properly installed concrete can last for over 50 years.
You can put new concrete over old concrete, however, there are many times you will not want to, including: If there is a door or staircase that would be in the way of adding a few inches of cement. Tree roots are in the way, causing the existing concrete to lift or move.
In order to produce a strong, resilient concrete mix, you need to get the ratio of aggregate to sand to cement right. So if you don't mix sand to the cement, cement will set of course but will give a lot of shrinkage crack and may not give the desired bonding.