Armour Dye System -
Have you ever been frustrated with all extra steps that are required when using acid stains on an interior concrete floor? The dry time of the stain, clean-up and neutralizing the next day, letting the floor dry out after the clean-up, and there still might be some spots where the acid stain did not react properly and now you have some bare spots that won’t take any stain. Then there's the question of "what do we use for the topcoat". You would like to apply a high-performance concrete coating, but technically the floor has not been properly prepped to get a sufficient bond out of your coating. If you decide to grind the floor first, you start to lose the marbling effect from the troweled surface of the concrete and things start look a bit bland. All this leads to spending a lot of time at the job site, as well as ending up applying an acrylic concrete sealer to get a good bond to floor and retain the classic look of acid stain, but acrylic sealers just won't give you the same long term performance as a concrete coating. This has always been a dilemma for the decorative concrete contractor.
Welcome to the world of Armour Dye!!!
Armour Dye is acetone based, this means it will dry quickly (about 10-15 seconds), there is no neutralizing required and clean-up is as easy as dry buffing the floor with a white scrubbing pad. Armour Dye doesn't need to react with the lime in the concrete, so you don't have to worry about spots in the floor that seem to bare of any color. Keep in mind that any repairs done to the floor might look a bit different, but it will be colored.
Prep Work -
Armour Dye will need to go onto a prepped concrete floor to ensure that it properly penetrates into the surface, so a light diamond grind is required. Just keep in mind that the dye is translucent, and you will see any deep scratches or gouges from the grinder, so make sure you do nice job grinding. The great part of this system is that since you have already prepped the floor for the dye, you are now ready use a high-performance coating as a topcoat.
Mixing & Spraying
The three components of Armour Dye are the dye pigment, acetone, and penetrating agent. Please make sure you follow the instructions for mixing the dye. You will also need an acetone dye sprayer. I would recommend the Chapin 21127XP, this sprayer is dripless and doesn't spit drops of dye when pulling or letting go of the trigger, it also sprays a fine mist right out of the box without any fussing around with additional tips. After you are done spraying the dye, make sure to run some clean acetone through your sprayer to clean it out before putting it away until the next job.
Clean-Up & Topcoats
We will need to do some clean-up before applying the topcoat. This will pull off any final dye residue that may be on the floor. Simply take a low speed floor buffer with a white scrubbing pad and run it over the floor. This is done completely dry and doesn't take much time or make much of a mess. The fact that we didn't need to use any water before or after the dye, means that we can go straight to putting on the topcoat as soon as the clean-up is done. No more waiting till the next day to let things dry out. You can use the concrete coating of your choice for the topcoat. However, to keep things simple, Rock Hard Urethane will give you a deep glossy look on the floor without any odder and is verry easy to use. For a matte look give our WB Matte Urethane a try.
Final Thoughts
Armour Dye is a fast, cost effective system that will allow you to create beautiful concrete floors at a low cost to the customer. However, this does not mean that you will have to sacrifice profit. The low cost of materials and the speed of which you can complete the project will still lead to the same profit margins as any other concrete coating job. So, if you are trying to get the look of an acid stained floor, without all the added time and extra steps. Give the Armour Dye system a try.
-Jeff Hershberger
Please feel free to send us an email with any questions you might have about Armour Dye or any other decorative concrete topic.
jeff@deco-cretesupply.com
