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Happenstance led Tyson Long, president of Calgary-based Hardscapes Inc., to the new location of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame museum in Calgary’s Canada Olympic Park, where he used white and clear epoxy coatings to transform the floor of the museum’s ice-hockey exhibit room into a virtual ice rink.
Pearlescent metallic effects are the latest hot trend in epoxies, and Aurora Epoxy Dust from McKinnon Materials Inc. is the most recent product to join the 3-D party.
Aurora Epoxy Dust is a powdered “nanopigment” that can be mixed into 100 percent solids epoxy. It is available in 12 standard colors.
Michael R. Jensen is CEO and artist at Atlanta Concrete Artist, billed as a purveyor of “exotic designer flooring.” He recently completed an epoxy garage floor for a car enthusiast in Sandy Springs, Ga.
The floors at this theme restaurant are alive with eye-popping pinks, blacks and sparkles. But the story about how they were sealed is just as much of a conversation-starter.
Even with a substrate riddled with cracks, pits and spalls, this high-build metallic finish will give your floor a look that is quietly mesmerizing.
Reminiscent of nothing so much as the surface of Jupiter, this rich swirling effect is guaranteed to take any floor up a notch.
Ryan Neal of SBR Concrete was hired by a former client to create a basement floor that had to be not only easy to clean, but also unique. The end result was a floor made with hand-shaped rectangular "stones," each individually colored so that no two would look exactly the same.
There were even unbelievable benefits from a concrete contractor’s standpoint. As Singapore is near the equator, temperatures are very stable and don’t typically swing much or swing quickly. It’s also quite humid. What this meant, from a concreter’s standpoint, was great latitude as to contraction joints.
Decorative epoxies for colorful garage floors burst onto the scene in the 1970s, when applicators began to saturate chemical-resistant epoxy coatings with colored vinyl chips. These floors went out of style for a while, but General Polymers director of floor coatings Lonnie Salyers says they are making a comeback, and not just in garages.
Known for their one-plus-one application process, epoxies promise adhesion, hardness, chemical resistance and versatility. Add color chips or metallic pigments, and they can be beautiful too.
