Epoxy Stone Maintenance.

May 16, 2019
Picture of Epoxy.com stone
Epoxy.com Epoxy Stone

A customer asks, “I have a patio with Chattahoochee or Chattahoochee like stone glued together with epoxy. It is no longer shinny and the stone is starting to come loose. What is causing this and what should I do about it?”

It sounds like you have a stone that was installed with Epoxy.com Product #17 – www.epoxy.com/17.aspx – or some other brand of stone adhesive. We tell all of our customers that install epoxied stone that they need to maintain by re-glazing it periodically. Unfortunately, not everyone is as forthright as us in telling their customers this.

We recommend you take these steps every spring and fall so you can enjoy your epoxied stone year-round.

1. Look at you epoxy stone and look determine if it needs maintenance. If it is still shinny and you don’t have loose stone, then you are done. Come back and do this step again in 6 months.

2. Clean your stone to remove algae, mold, oil, grease and any other contaminants from it. Typically, contamination is just algae and mold and can be removed with a weak Clorox and water combination with a thorough rinse with a hose or gentle pressure wash. Allow your stone to dry completely before proceeding.

3. Determine if it has only lost its shine or if you have loose stone. Decide if sections of the stone are so loose that they need to be reinstalled with Product #17 (4 below) or if there are just a few to no loose stones and you just want to re-glaze it (5 below).

4. If stone needs to be picked up and reinstalled in areas do that with Epoxy.com Product #17. Contact Epoxy.com Technical support for the amount of product you need. We can also go over the reinstallation of these areas with you. If the stone is sound or has just a few stones that you are not worried about replacing you can proceed to 4 below.

5. Apply 1-2 coats of Epoxy.com Product #15 (depending on how bad the stone has weathered) to the top of your clean dry stone. This will give you back your original shine and strengthen the interface (bond line) between the stones. Product #15 is the best product to do this with as experience has shown it lasts 1.5 to 2 times longer than convention epoxies used for this application.

6. CAUTION: You can find single component so called “Chattahoochee” . These sealers add shine to your epoxy stone but do not strengthen the interface between the stone. Using this kind of sealer can ruin your epoxy stone. Once these inexpensive sealers are on they are difficult to impossible to remove. Making it optionally impossible to ever re-glaze the epoxy stone properly again.

As always when in doubt contact Epoxy.com Technical support at info@epoxy.com or by calling 352-533-2167.

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Posted by Norm Lambert

Maintaining Epoxy Stone

May 17, 2016

Epoxy_Stone_Overlays

Product #17 Epoxy Stone Overlay, with mixed stone sizes

It is that time of year again. If you have Epoxy Stone Overlays you know it gives  beautiful natural look. The Epoxy Stone Overlay looks like wet shinny rock. It allows water to flow more naturally, giving you additional drainage in areas that you are walking where you feet might get wet if it is raining or near a water source like a pool.

As time goes by your stone will get less shinny.  This is not just an esthetic issue.  The

Epoxy stone overlays need to be reglazed from time to time. That is true about epoxy stone overlay systems available from us or from anyone else. In some parts of the country in the direct sunlight this could be every year. Other parts of the country with less sun might be 5 or more years. If you wait to long to reseal your stone it will start failing as the bond breaks down between the individual stones. The stones will then start becoming loose. If not resealed soon enough eventially the whole system will fail. Sealing at proper intervals with the right material is the only way to prevent this.

If you don’t want a system you need to maintain, we have other (non rock) systems that require little or no maintanance.

Resealing the Epoxy Stone Overlay.

Product #15 Chemical Resistant Epoxy Floor Resurfacing System is typically used for resealing epoxy bonded stone. Product #15 Chemical Resistant Resurfacing system oxidizes much slower than other epoxies, and usually last much longer than other epoxies used for reglazing epoxied stone pebbles. You don’t want to use other epoxies that oxidize excessively unless you are willing to reglaze 1.5 to 2 times more often than with Product #15.

The Product #15 Epoxy to reseal your stone not only adds shine back but actually reinforces the connections between the stone. Never use acrylic and other sealers commonly sold at big box stores to reseal your stone. These non-epoxy sealers add shine back to the stone, but doesn’t do anything to reinforce the bond between the individual stones. Worse yet unless the single component non-epoxy sealers have totally been warn away, they will act as a bond breaker preventing future epoxy resealing from getting to the surfaces they need to get to, in order to give you your original strenth back.

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Posted by Norm Lambert

Tombstone Repairs with Epoxy

August 22, 2012

A technician who uses a non-Epoxy.com product to repair tombstones wrote me recently looking for help with problems that he was having.  He goes on to say that the epoxy that he uses never fails, but rather the stone fails. When a secondary break occurs, the stone always re-breaks about 2 mm (about ¾ inch) above or below the epoxy joint.  The epoxy attached to about 2 mm of the stone and holds well.

He asked me if the epoxy shrinks so much that it will ‘ pull away ‘ from the stone it’s attached to, and in his case, it pulls about 2mm of stone with it.

No I doubt it is epoxy shrinkage causing the problem. High quality epoxy has little or no shrinkage.  It would have to be a very poor quality epoxy to be shrinking enough to do that.

The reason his epoxy is not working is that it is too rigid.  His existing rigid material has a “high modulus of elasticity”.  A material with “high modulus of elasticity” is a material that is stiff and/or rigid.  A “low modulus of elasticity” material is semi-flexible, and is not rigid or brittle.

Smaller pieces of the stone structure (in this case a tombstone) and pieces not in touch with the ground tend to get hotter and cooler faster than the larger pieces and pieces with ground contact. This is called “differential timing of the event”. For example the top of a tombstone can be heated and cooled on 5 sides, the top and the 4 sides. The base of the tombstone which is buried in the ground has earth or stone on all of its surfaces.  This earth and stone tends to keep the temperature of the base more stable by insulating it and slowing the change in temperature. This works much like the insulation in your house slows temperature changes inside your house.

When an object like a piece of stone is heated it expands (gets bigger).  When an object cools it contracts (gets smaller).  For example 100 feet of concrete will be 1 inch longer once it is heated 100 degrees F.  That is why expansion joints are cut into concrete.

In the case of tombstones all the pieces of the same type of stone have very similar if not identical “coefficient of expansion”. Since the pieces are positioned with potentially different timing of heating and cooling there is a “differential timing of the event” (see above). The result is stress areas you are seeing in the closest weakened plane in the stone near the bond line.

Product #2005  was specifically designed for tombstone (monuments) and/or stone bonding, or repair. Epoxy.com Product #2005 is very strong yet it is has a “low modulus of elasticity” (semi-flexible).  The low-modulus of elasticity helps to absorb differential movement (two sections of stone heating and cooling at different times), making it much less likely to cause a stress area in adjacent weakened planes.

Camouflage the bond line rubbing stone dust(ground off the original stone or a similar colored stone) into any exposed epoxy material while the epoxy is still “wet”. That way the dust will stick in the wet epoxy making the epoxy difficult to impossible to see.

Please send your additional question and blog ideas to norm@epoxy.com

 

Leave a Comment » | adhesive, bonding, crack isolation epoxy, Epoxy, flexible Epoxy Membrane, glue, Structural Repairs, Surface Preparation, tombstone repair | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Norm Lambert

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