Sorry Mr. Bond, when it comes to durability of concrete, a stirred-in hardener is much better than a shake-on!

Enhancing the durability of a bare concrete floor can easily double its service life and dramatically reduce maintenance and repair costs over its lifetime. This is especially true for high-traffic floors and industrial floors exposed to harsh conditions.

Until recently, a common practice has been to shake on a dry mixture of hard aggregates and extra cementing materials, which are then troweled into the fresh concrete surface during finishing. Shake-on hardeners, as they are called, have always suffered from limitations:

• They are dependent on skilled and attentive workers to apply the shake-on evenly and at the required spread rate.
• They cannot be used on vertical surfaces or outdoors where freezing-thawing protection requires air entrainment.
• They only harden the top few millimeters of the concrete.

More recently, though, innovations in the concrete industry have led many contractors to stop installing shake-on products.

Firstly, contractors point to the difficulty in applying shake-on products to modern concrete made with limestone cement. Known as Type 1L cement in the United States, it contains 10% or more limestone and is ground much finer than traditional cement. Concrete made using this cement has a higher water demand and thus tends to be drier when it comes time for finishing. Adding a dry shake-on powder to the surface and attempting to trowel that in will often prove quite difficult and sometimes will lead to surface cracking, delaminations and other problems.

Secondly, many new industrial floors are specified with very tight tolerances for flatness. Such tolerances are necessary for the effective function of automated guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots, and for other reasons. Many contractors who deliver such floors for their clients are reluctant to attempt incorporating a shake-on into their very precise floor finishing process.

What is the alternative? Kryton International is known around the world for inventing the first crystalline waterproofing admixture. This 1980’s innovation replaced surface-applied waterproofing with an admixture that is mixed into the concrete. Similarly, Kryton now offers an integral hardening admixture called Hard-Cem, which can be blended into any concrete mixture at the time of batching. It arrives at the project site already in the concrete and requires no labor or time to install. Costing the same or less than shake-on applications, Hard-Cem outperforms shake-on products and more than doubles the service life of concrete floors exposed to harsh abrasion when compared to plain concrete.

Whether replacing a shake-on hardener or designing with Hard-Cem from the outset, Hard-Cem has proven itself to be the technology of choice with over 80 million square feet already in service. Contact Kryton at info@kryton.com or visit www.kryton.com.

Did you know: Bond’s famous line was originally written as “stirred, not shaken” but Sean Connery mistakenly said “shaken, not stirred” during filming. It was never corrected and the erroneous line went on to become one of the most iconic in cinema history.