If you have an auto shop in Denver, Aurora, or Lakewood, the right flooring is essential for keeping your business clean and professional looking, and preventing damage from tools, fluids, other items, and events. One of those events is hot tire pickup.
This is a potential issue in many garages. Overtime, it can cause extensive damage to your flooring. With a high quality epoxy coating for commercial garages and auto shops, you can ensure a longer lasting floor that is immune from hot tire pickup.
What is Hot Tire Pickup?
As a car drives, the rolling friction of the tires on the road causes the rubber to heat up. Heated rubber will expand slightly. Then, when the car pulls into your auto shop, the heat will dissipate into the air and the cooler garage floor. As the heat dissipates, the rubber shrinks and the weight of the car means that the tire rubber pulls at the floor with enough force to rip small particles completely free of the underlying surface.
Certain garage flooring materials, like plain concrete or acrylic coatings, will readily come up due to hot tire pickup. Each time this happens, it weakens your floor just a little bit more until the top surface becomes extremely pitted and scratched, further exposing it to additional damage.
Because this is a known problem in many garages, it is important to choose a flooring type and installation method that will help your floor resist hot tire pickup. The leading solution is a professionally installed epoxy coating. Epoxy is able to withstand the pull of rubber tires due to several different characteristics:
- High Tensile Strength – Tensile strength is the amount which a material can bend without breaking. This means that epoxy coating can be significantly pulled by a hot tire without breaking.
- High Cohesive Strength – Cohesive strength is the bond of individual particles within a material to each other. Epoxy has a very high cohesive strength, while concrete or acrylic have much lower cohesive strengths. This makes it harder for a tire to pull bonded particles of epoxy flooring apart.
While epoxy naturally has these characteristics, an epoxy floor that resists hot tire pickup should also be professionally installed and use high quality epoxy products which are designed for commercial settings, like auto garages, that will experience heavy use. These products bond more strongly and are more resistant to the heat of hot tires.
The professional installation from a team like ours at Colorado Concrete Repair will also yield a better result. We use concrete grinding to prepare the underlying concrete surface for the epoxy coating. This grinding and preparation creates a surface that the epoxy adheres extremely well to, reducing the risk that epoxy will detach from the underlying surface at the pull of a shrinking tire.
Colorado Concrete Repair works with commercial garages, dealer service centers, and other auto repair in the Denver, Colorado area to provide high quality, durable epoxy flooring. We can work with you to design a floor that will withstand hot tire pickup and any of the other conditions the floors in your commercial garage endure. Start your project with a call to our team to get a free quote.
