Oregon store sports glossy golden O thanks to decorative overlay

Nailing the gold in the O that is the official logo of University of Oregon sports couldn’t have been easy. But here it is, on a dyed and polished cement overlay floor at The Duck Store in the Clackamas Town Center shopping mall, near Portland, Ore.

Finishers Sustainable Flooring Solutions, Vancouver, Wash., came onto a floor with a freshly installed Levelrock Quik-Top underlayment. They used AmeriPolish Gold dye diluted to half strength and applied several times to get the richness in tone. The underlay material was white and more porous than a concrete matrix, which helped.

The surface was polished to 400 grit before dyeing, with a specially cut stencil mask used to shape the O. After the dye application, the floor was densified with Lythic Densifier and burnished with a fine diamond pad made by Norton Abrasives. Lythic Protector was applied with a pump sprayer, and the floor was burnished again with hogs-hair pads to achieve the final gloss.

Brad Sleeper of Lythic Solutions sent Concrete Decor the photos. Specialty cement products such as Levelrock often contain significant amounts of blast slag or fumed silica, which Lythic Densifier reacts with quickly, he says. "Specialty cement products do not contain as much portland cement as concrete, so they have limited reaction to the application of silicate densifiers that need cement hydration byproducts to react,” he adds.

Lythic's densifier and its reaction with silicates offer better abrasion resistance than silicate densifiers do, Sleeper claims.