The Day Itself

Everything else here tells you the sequence and the timings. This tells you what the room looks like while it is happening: how many people, where they stand, and what each of them is doing. It is the part that decides whether the working time feels comfortable or terrifying.

Two people minimum. Three is better.

One person cannot do this. Not because it is heavy, but because the clock starts when the two parts meet and does not pause while you fetch something. With a kit mixed and twenty minutes of working time, every walk back to the bucket is time the resin spends curing in a pail instead of on the floor.

• The mixer. Mixes and carries, and never puts the drill down. Their entire job is that the applicator never waits and never walks.
• The applicator. In spike shoes, spreading. Does not mix, does not fetch, does not answer the door.
• The broadcaster. Throws flake into wet coating, immediately behind the applicator. This is the third person, and the one people leave out.

With two people the applicator broadcasts as well, which means stopping to pick up flake and staying one pair of hands behind for the rest of the floor. That works on a single-car garage. On anything larger the third person is the difference between finishing comfortably and finishing badly.

The motion

The mixer carries a full pail to the far end and pours it out as a ribbon across the floor — a line of material, not a puddle. The applicator works that ribbon back toward themselves. Before they run out, the mixer has laid the next ribbon in front of them.

• Hold the notched squeegee at about 45 degrees, angled toward you, and walk backwards.
• Pull it in a long S, overlapping each pass. You are spreading material and pushing it down, not scraping it up.
• Back-roll what you just spread to even it out and knock down the squeegee lines.
• The broadcaster follows, throwing flake up and letting it fall — never at the floor.

You work the floor in strips this way, retreating toward the door. Nobody should ever be standing on coating they cannot get off.

Why a notched squeegee, specifically

Because it sets the film thickness for you. The notches meter how much material passes underneath, so the coat comes out at the thickness the notch dictates rather than the thickness you judged. No wet film gauge, no guessing, no argument about mils halfway across a garage.

A flat squeegee gives you whatever pressure you happened to apply, and that changes as you get tired. Of everything on the tool list, this is the one most worth buying rather than improvising.

The tools that actually matter

• A notched squeegee. Midwest Rake make the ones most contractors use. Match the notch size to the film thickness you are after.
• Spike shoes, so the applicator can stand in wet coating without leaving anything behind.
• A variable-speed drill. Not optional. A single-speed drill whips air into the mix, and that air becomes pinholes in your floor. Slow and thorough beats fast.
• A jiffy-style mixing paddle long enough to reach the bottom of the pail.
• A gauge or duckbill trowel if you are coving at the walls — round-nosed, so it pulls a tight cove.
• A spiked roller and an extension pole for back-rolling.

Renting the grinder

Most rental counters carry EDCO machines, and the ones taking magnetic inserts are what you want, because the insert decides the profile you get. Ask for inserts meant to profile concrete rather than to level it. A lot of what sits on the shelf is designed to take down high spots, and it will polish your slab instead of opening it.

Tell the counter what you are doing rather than which machine you think you want. Say you need to open a slab for a coating and name the profile you are targeting, and somebody who rents these every day will put the right head on it.

Edges and corners are hand work. A handheld bush hammer attachment is the tool almost nobody thinks to hire, and it cuts a genuine profile into the strip a walk-behind cannot reach — which is exactly where floors start to fail.

What to wear, and why it matters more here than you would expect

A respirator, not a dust mask. Every person in the garage, from the moment the first pail is opened until the coating has gone off.

Polyaspartic coatings cure through an isocyanate reaction. That is what makes them tough, fast and UV stable, and it is also the one genuine health risk in this job. Isocyanate vapor can sensitize the airway — and sensitization is not like an irritation that fades. Once a person becomes sensitized they react to traces of it afterwards, for good. Most people never do. The ones who do usually got there in a poorly ventilated room without protection.

A professional crew wears respirators for this without thinking about it. The reason it needs saying here is that a garage with the door pulled halfway down in February is a much smaller room than a plant floor, and nobody is handing you the equipment.

• A half-face respirator with organic-vapor cartridges for everyone in the room. Not a paper dust mask, not a surgical mask — neither does anything about vapor. This is inexpensive and available from any hardware store.
• Nitrile gloves, and a spare pair each. Not latex.
• Eye protection — sealed, not open-sided. The body coat is a skin and eye irritant and the person broadcasting flake is throwing material at knee height.
• Cross-ventilation, not one open door. Air needs somewhere to go as well as somewhere to come from. A box fan in the doorway blowing out is worth more than the door being open wider.
• Long sleeves, and clothes you will not wear again.

One thing this system deliberately is not: a spray product. Spraying isocyanates atomizes them, which is a different level of exposure requiring supplied-air equipment and training. Rolled and squeegeed, with a cartridge respirator and real ventilation, is a job somebody can safely do at home. That is why the system is built to be laid by hand.

Anyone with asthma or an existing respiratory condition should sit this one out, or hire it out — buying the coatings and having somebody else lay them is a route we are glad to sell you.

Before anybody opens a pail

This is what separates a calm day from a bad one, and all of it happens before the clock starts.

• Everyone in the room has a respirator on, gloves on, and eyes covered. This is the item people skip because the first pail has not been opened yet, which is exactly when to do it.
• Everything is in the garage, opened, and within reach. Nobody leaves the room once mixing starts.
• Buckets are marked and measured, so nobody is reading a label with resin curing behind them.
• Flake is open and in tubs the broadcaster can carry, not still in the bag.
• Everyone has said out loud which job they are doing.
• You have agreed which end you start from and which door you finish at.

Flake will not go into coating that has begun to set. If the broadcaster falls behind the applicator, that strip does not get a second chance — it has to be abraded and recoated. Every rule above exists to stop that one thing happening.