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Carpet glue removal: one solution


Posted by Just a guy on February 24th, 2005 03:45 PM
In reply to Glue Removal by woodstock717 on September 5th, 2004 01:02 PM [Go to top of thread]

20 of 20 people found this post helpful

I'm not claiming that this is the best solution, and it's certainly not the only solution, but it worked for me.

Equipment needed:
-Rent a standing, electric floor buffer - the type you've seen school janitors using to buff the floors - from your local equipment rental joint (every mid-sized town has one of these places).
-the buffer will have a replaceable head. You will need to get: a) a carbon bladed scraper head, b) a scrubbing head with a few thick, black scrubbing pads (I used 4 pads for my 200 sq foot floor), and c) a sandpaper head with a bunch of heavy grit sandpaper (I used 10 pieces of 20 grit sandpaper).
-Have a shop vac handy - it will get lots of use
-the total cost to me for renting this gear was $160. That covered equipment rental for 24 hours and all of the disposable items (pads and sandpaper). I already own a shop vac, so that cost is not included. I live in the Bay Area in CA and I'm sure this gear would be cheaper most other places.

What to do:
Warning note - I am 6'0", 190 lbs and pretty strong, and this was a good workout!
1)Rip up carpet and carpet padding (of course)
2)Use the carbon scraper head to pull up most of the glue from the floor. This will require going over the floor row by row, two or three times. Make sure to shop vac up the debris between turns around the room. You will get lots of debris in the first pass and less and less on subsequent passes. You want to be very thorough here as the scraper does the majority of the dirty work, and any glue you miss here will just gum up the sanding disks later. Pay special attention to the edges of the room which are harder to get at and seem to have more glue applied.
3)Okay, now you have a floor mostly scraped clean of glue. Time to wash with glue remover. Does this seem redundant after scraping? Well, maybe. But this glue is tenacious and the scraping will miss some and will gum up the sanding discs to no end. So step 3 is to put on the scrubbing disc holder attachment with one of the black scrubbing discs. Spray on your choice of glue remover. I used some stuff from a company called Decosup (no I don't work for them!) that worked well and is non-toxic. I used a pump-action sprayer (like the kind used for spraying weeds in your garden), but you would use an old spray bottle or whatever's handy. I let that cleaner work into the floor for a few minutes. Then I re-wet the floor to re-slick the surface (makes controlling the machine much easier) and once again made my way around the room twice - changing pads in-between rounds. You'll see a lot of dirt and glue come off in the pads. Following the directions for the cleaner, I then brought a hose into the room and hosed down the floor and used another scrubber to work the cleaner out of the floor with the water. I would work in sections, cleaning up the water/mess with my shop vac in between sections. I went over the floor twice like this to get up all of the cleaner (which, although non-toxic, did have quite a strong smell).
4)Now you have a fairly clean and glue-free floor. To prepare it for laying down more concrete (which is what I was doing) or to remove the stains in the concrete from years of carpet glue, I used the sanding disks. Use the sanding disc head on the machine. Once again I covered the room twice, using my 10 sanding discs (they're easy to change out). After sanding I shop vacuumed up the dust. At the end I put the scrubber head back on and used it along with water to scrub out any remaining dust. Using the shop vac one last time to pull up the dusty water (that seems like an oxymoron).

Okay, so 4 main steps with a bunch of smaller steps in between. For my 200 square foot room I probably spent a good 6-8 hours getting the floor completely clean. But at the end I had some pretty darn fresh concrete, ready for anything.

One note on the buffer. There is definitely a trick to using these things and they are heavy, unruly beasts. First of all, have the rental shop person give you a quick demo/lesson. But here's some quick advice: tip back the handle until it's at hip height. This gives you a comfy holding position that's very strong and you can use your hips to help hold and guide the machine. Now, when you turn the thing on it's probably going to jump away from you. Note that they turn continuously in one direction with a lot of weight bearing down on them, and a lot of friction (supplied by whatever head you are using) trying to pull them one way or another. Mine rotated counter-clockwise. So, when I pushed up on the handle, I was putting weight on the front of whatever pad I was using. This caused the machine to pull to the right. When I pushed down on the handle, I was putting weight on the back of the pad I was using. This caused the machine to pull to the left. And when I had the machine more or less perfectly balanced front to back, it would pretty-much sit still. Once you get a feel for this movement, you can use it to steer the machine where you want it.

I wrote this b/c I was looking for the answer and didn't find it anywhere. So hopefully I'll help out someone else. Well, best of luck and I hope this was helpful.

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