I was asked by a church where I will be installing a kitchen in a community area and day care area in their basement to help with the removal of a rubber style glue on the floor. Originally I advised them to cover up the asbestos tile but they insisted on removal. The asbestos abatement company did a decent job removing the tile but left the glue which has to be removed before the new floor can be installed. The floor will be a combination of tile, prefinished hardwoods, and hi-tech rubber. The floor contractor wants nothing to do with the glue removal.
I’ve already tried burning and scraping but the fumes and smoke was unacceptable. I am considering sandblastng and have someone coming in to test that possibility. There is abour 3200 sq.’ of floor. Any ideas guys?
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I've used a heatgun. Melt, wait, then scrape.
Somewhere in this forum is a thread where someone recommended using dry ice. Makes the stuff brittle, so you can easily scrape it off.
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Dry ice sound interesting, like putting an ice cube on gum to harden it for easy removal.
Does the cold you think, brittle the concrete surface, encourge spalling if it's weakened already.
I'm curious because sometimes that adhesive is asbestos based as well. Did your abatement company assure you the glue was non-hazardous? If it's certified to be safe than there are a number of ways but I wouldn't use flame, safe or not the fumes are bound to permeate the area and reak for a while.
Heavy scraping with razor scrapers then sanding with floor sanders maybe even grinding the surface might be best if it's safe to do so.
There are some solvent orange based removers like
http://www.grs-systems.com/item98.htm
I don't have experience with this type but there are many products waiting to be Googled.
My wife and I restored a floor in a 100 year old hotel. It had beautiful mosaic tiles underneath several layers of flooring. It took about a month to do about 1200 square feet. We tried all kinds of things, and none worked great. I'm not sure what the adhesive was, but most of it was a black tar like substance. We alernated between using a heat gun and chemicals as we got tired of one or the other. One thing that was definately helpful was a heavy duty floor polisher. The one we have is a low rpm one, not the higher speed buffing kind. It weighs about 100 lbs and takes the round scrubbing pads. 3M/Scotch makes many different levels of abrasiveness in these pads. We were using the most abrasive ones, which were like steel wool with grit fused to it. Stuff like you might clean a barbaque with. These were the most expensive ones also, like $10 or $15 each. We probably used about a dozen of them.
We would use the machine over the chemically softened adhesive. We used various paint strippers, none of which worked great. I would not want to go through that again just to put new flooring over it. If I were flooring over, I be looking into putting a skim coat of something over the whole thing.
Thanks all for the suggestions. I'm going to try plastic pellet blasting the the stuff in a day or so.; will let you know how it turns out. With 3200 sq. ft. the heat gun would be exhausting and one of my guys would probably turn a real gun on me if he had do that for a couple of weeks. The dry ice though is intriguing and is my partners choice. He's a big S. King fan and likes the ambience we could create in a 200 yr. old Church. Thanks all,
Ed EC Painting and Remodeling.
Providence RI
There is issue with the glue as well for asbestos. Usual advice is not to sand or blast where there would be fine dust. I would have this tested and not take the responsibility later if asbestos is found again. Hope this helps.
Adhesive has been tested by city, and state with negative results on both tests. Since both tests were negative the asbestos removal contractor felt his part of the was done. Thanks for the concern.
As to have already noted, there is a good chance the "glue" (likely aka "cutback adhesive") has asbestos - although I would have expected the asbestos abatement company to have tested it.
See, e.g.: http://www.fcimag.com/CDA/Archives/0a10a398a9c5e010VgnVCM100000f932a8c0____
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There are some old adhesives that come up with hot water, as in as hot as you can get it. Try a small area first. You can use an old towel soaked in hot water and let it set for a few minutes, then scrape with a floor scraper. If it works, and you won't damage anything, flood an area with hot water then scrape.
You might also look at soda blasting.