Garage Floor Epoxy | Broadcasting Flakes

hey this is chrisy Idaho painter thanks for watching this free lesson on how to epoxy a garage floor if you want to see more of my comprehensive course it's at paint life supply.com it goes over estimating it goes over marketing it goes over all the steps to complete a professional garage epoxy FL so hopefully you enjoy this lesson thank you for watching all right so we're going to be talking about broadcasting flakes Tony and broadcasting flakes we have you know a couple options we've got a full broadcast and we got a sparse broadcast I mean I think I prefer a full broadcast is there any benefits to actually broadcasting flakes on an epoxy floor well so no durability benefits the benefits you're going to receive are hiding dirt debris and scratching so that full flake is really going to give you those attributes where a sparse flake you're going to see a little bit more of that as well as leave yourself open to the homeowner not liking the flakes in one area compared to another right so I I've got a solid color floor and what I've noticed over the years uh scratches show up everywhere you draag drag a cardboard box in it scratches it with a full flake floor you're not going to have that problem yeah you might have scratches that appear in the coating like that are in the coating but you're not going to visualize them you're not going to see them cuz those flakes will mask that I know a solid color also my floor I'm always mopping it and stuff and cleaning it uh snow SL softs my vehicles it leaves black dirt and grime you know so a flag floor is going to help hide that definitely will help that yeah one of the one of the you know colors I chose for this FL we're going to be doing is this color option right here and I think you know for our climate up here that's going to really hide the the snow dirt black dirt and Grime on the floor the floor is not going to look so dingy and dirty like all winter long so uh do you think that's you know am I safe to assume that you are safe to assuming that particular color that you chose is probably going to be one of the best in masking uh the dirt that will appear in this typee of climate and so if you're new watching this course so broadcasting flakes you know I I've used like Mechanical Devices you know in the past like a little weed spreader but it's probably there's multiple different flake options now and it's probably you know not a good idea to broadcast them using like a device but you just throw them out with your hands is that how you do it yeah so the majority of time we're going to be utilizing just a bucket and just throwing them in the air and letting them fall on a full podcast so there's nothing no um science behind and everything we're just toss them in the air letting them fall down and eventually scraping them uh and cleaning up you know everything and then top coating it you are correct I would say the only scient science that goes into it is just making sure any spot that's wet receiv receives some flakes yep there we go so back in my day when um early on in my career there was only one option of flakes now there's all kinds of options so you have you know small flakes tiny flakes you got flakes that look like I can salt and pepper my food with and these look almost edible you've got I mean is it just endless how many options you have yes today they keep pushing the envelope of options and it's amazing just when you think okay they can't add anything else they add something that'll maybe look like a terazzo flooor or recycled glass in your floor or glitter in your floor and and so there's tons of customization options I think though to keep it simple use a quarter inch flake it masss all your surface imperfections so uh would this be a quarter inch flake right here yeah this should be the quarter inch right there quarter and half kind of looks similar if you don't want your floor to look like you know a flake floor of 20 years ago what would you do yeah great question so you can do the hybrids or you could uh utilize something where you broadcast sparsely a larger flake and then broadcast it to rejection with the full flake and that'll give you a unique look that your neighbors likely don't have sounds pretty cool so these flakes what are these flakes even made of they're made of acrylic uh the super top secret we're not really certain of because the manufacturer won't let anyone know right I think there's only a few manufacturers of these flakes isn't that true there are there are two manufacturers uh that are in the United States currently does Rustoleum sell the flakes and if so you know um how do we get a hold of them yeah great question so we do sell the flakes they're usually going to be be available at a local Rustoleum seal create dealer and if one of the stocked type Blends isn't of Interest we can completely customize it cool that's good to know so we'll leave the links you where you can actually get the flakes get the products right here in this video so um there's flake options so you've got a lot of different options you know to make your floor look unique make it look cool flake it to hide scratch scratches or to hide imperfections you know in the concrete uh to hide dirt debris stuff like that so you can either do a floor that's solid color sparse flaked or full flaked so whenever we're doing a flake floor we want to make sure we have the same batch code and so here you can see we have our mushroom and then we have our Lot number and that's going to be our batch code and we want to make sure that all matches another tip is to also open up the boxes you're going to use on this project make sure they're the flakes that you wanted it has happened periodically where it's not the right blend Inside the Box there's a Mis labeling um very infrequent though um another thing we do when we open up these boxes is we're actually going to blend the Flakes with our hands a little bit cuz they get clumped and compressed down here and what you'll find when we pour this bag out is the very end is going to have a lot of fine particles they're going to go in the bucket we're going to do our best not to get those all over the floor we want to make sure we're throwing the big flake uh not the crushed ones as you can see I'm even going to inter blend the flakes out of the box by not um by not filling one one bucket with with one box make sure to keep your box in your bag because there's a good chance you're going to reclaim a lot of this tomorrow and that way you can store it for the next job where you're going to make money uh on the flake is utilizing similar Blends frequently because anything that we don't scrape we're going to be able to reclaim uh and then utilize on the next job which is just money in your pocket the flakes are purchased by the Box uh 40 lb uh being the most common the coverage rate we're going for today is between 5 to 8 square fet per pound so there's you know different methods of broadcasting your flakes you can do you know a sparse y uh flake your floor and if you're doing a sparse flake floor you're just going to be broadcasting your flakes you know sparsely and i' just be tossing them in the air just like this getting a sparse broadcast now it all just depends on what the customer wants you can get a sparse broadcast like that you can do a medium you know broadcast and do a little bit more we're going to be doing a full broadcast so we're going to be covering this whole floor with our flakes so what I see when I look out here is we're just hitting the floor the first time then we're going to come back over it again but you can see where it's soaked in a little bit where maybe we didn't get as many any flakes or um we have a little bit thicker Mill thickness there that might cause it to look different so we just want to make sure when we get done we come back and hit everything that might look a little shiny still yeah so when we get done with this we're going to let it cure about 16 to 20 hours come back Leaf blow all the excess flake into a corner we're going to be able to reclaim and reutilize that cuz everything's going to be dry uh once we put our scrapers on the floor then that flake goes right in the trash