Earthblog

It’s fairly common for us to get calls from production facilities looking to clean up industrial excess.  In a production environment, it’s common for stuff to spill or fall onto the floor and build up over time.

Whether it’s latex, rubber, wax, paint, or other soft materials, you can often take it up with a walk behind floor scraper, rather than a diamond grinder.  It’s a simpler process, less that could go wrong, and less expensive to run the machine over time.  Plus, depending on the floor that you’re removing the materials from, a scraper is a safer option.

Grinding stuff like this off a floor will wear the floor down over time.  This is especially true if you’re going to be forced to grind the same spots over and over and over, while not touching other parts of the floor.

If you’re thinking about a floor grinder for this kind of “industrial clean up”, you may find that a walk-behind scraper is actually the better option.

It’s not just about the machine you use, but the tooling is also important.  The world’s greatest surgeon wouldn’t be able to do much with a chainsaw, and the World Lumberjack Champion would be “up a tree” if all he had was a scalpel to operate with.

Still, it’s not uncommon for us to get calls from people out there who have run into problems on the job because they didn’t have the right tooling for the job at hand.  Sometimes these are our clients, other times, just guys who bought or rented a floor removal machine elsewhere.

Whatever the situation, there are basically two reasons you might run in to trouble.  Either the machine is limited in what kind of tooling you can use with it, or maybe you’re just running into something you’re not sure how best to tackle.

Let’s deal with the machine first.  Some machines are simply not designed to do certain things.  You can occasionally do “work arounds”, but that can be a pain.  You could theoretically grind an entire room with an edge grinder, but that’s really not the best way to go, is it?  And you can go at ceramic tile with a lightweight floor stripper, just don’t expect good results.
 
While a little ingenuity can come in handy, you don’t want to have to be MacGyver to have to figure out how to get 4,000 feet of hardwood up in 2 days with a butterknife, sandpaper, and some dental floss.  Making sure you have the right equipment for the work you bid and take on will not only make your life easier, it will help you get more business.

The other situation which might come up is when you have the right machine, and even the right tooling in your toolbox, but aren’t sure what to use.  Some of our machines have 30 or 40 or more different blades and attachments, so you can be sure you can handle whatever comes up.  That can sometimes lead to indecision.

That’s where our expertise and experience comes in handy.  Feel free to call us anytime.  We have experts on our team that have seen it all.  We can talk through your situation with you, and help you figure out a game plan to get the job done in the best way.