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Like the kids' game, each garage floor style has its advantage. Mat you're throwing at it matters most.
Mike Parker's American Garage Floor is dedicated to garage products such as rollout mats and interlocking tile systems that beautify and protect the concrete floor in your shop. Parker, who has more than 20 years of experience with what he calls surfacing, also applies epoxy-based floors with a crew. He is essentially unbiased toward specific types of covering, believing that each type of floor can be the best choice depending on the enduser's situation.
Parker offers only Better Life Technology's Parking Pad brand of mat and Evertile's Lock-tile brand of interlocking tile. He does not-as sometimes happens with today's Internet-based companies-disguise one business as many.
It's amazing what a nice floor can do for your shop. If you're fortunate to have a volunteer crew, it's your responsibility to make the garage inhabitable. Your crew shouldn't need to step over piles of junk. A nice, clean floor is the difference between having a race shop and just a garage. We installed a consumer type epoxy floor in our shop and having a prepped-floor spoiled us. The epoxy performed well, but we were especially tough on it. So we sought Parker's advice on a style of flooring.
"We install epoxy floors, but the only stuff that we can guarantee won't come up requires respirators and ventilation to put down," says Parker. "If you have us coat your floor, it's going to be beautiful and it's not going to come up. With that, however, comes a [high] price tag. American Garage Floor is a two-year-old company that came out of the need for an alternative to these do-it-yourself epoxy kits.
"Our parking pad is a rollout vinyl mat that's a lot thicker than a coating, and you don't have to worry about chipping, peeling, and scratching like a consumer-installed coated floor. It's .075" to .080" mil spec of flexible PVC," says Parker. "It's a lot less expensive than even the tiles, but gives you a nice surface, and it's durable and excellent for race cars."
The other do-it-yourself product is an interlocking system of tiles. "The tiles are a commercial, industrial-grade flooring that's a quarter-inch-thick of PVC, so it's a pretty tough floor. Installation can be done in an afternoon, and it looks like a well-thought-out flooring system because it is."
Tile-type floors may look similar among brands, but Parker says there are significant differences. "There are cheap plastic floors that we could sell, but I won't do it because of quality," says Parker, who uses only Lock-tile.
Some brands have an open-type surface that is claimed to be good for drainage. "The flow-through design means water, debris, fluids, and everything else goes right through to the concrete. If you get sticky stuff like soda down there, it's going to attract bugs, ants, and make a sticky mess. You need to pick up the floor and power-wash everything out. Even if the 'ventilated' design lets the water dry out, all that salt and stuff is still down there."
Other tile designs look similar to Evertile's Lock-tile but have a drastically different feel. Our experience has been the Lock-tiles are cushiony but allow floor jacks to move properly. They offer sound absorption for a quieter shop, and they provide a thermal barrier so it's warmer. They do not have the noisy, plastic feel other products have.
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 COLOR CHOICES: "I strongly suggest dark colors for under the car because that's where most of the grease, grime, and dirt will collect;' says Lock-tile manufacturer Nigel Mandel. Small wheels that are typically found in a race shop roll, slide, and move across the coin-pattern top.
"Some flooring tiles are polypropylene, but ours is a vinyl, which is flexible," says Lock-tile's Nigel Mandel. "If you have cracks in the floor or it's slightly uneven, our product will mold into the unevenness, so walking on it is like tapping your foot on the dashboard. The other products will float on top of it and that makes it noisy. Our product will mold into the floor and you haven't got that plasticky sound."
Parker says apparent differences in price are negated by other benefits from his company. "Right now we're selling at $3.25 per square foot. People compare with prices but aren't aware that we give free shipping. So beyond the increased quality, the free shipping reduces the consumer's cost. The shipping is a biggie because those tiles are heavy."
For most customers, Parker suggests sealing a tile floor with urethane, which is applied with a roller. "I recommend the urethane sealer be applied to the top, especially if there's a lot of liquids in the shop. The interlocked tiles we offer are the best I've seen at being water-resistant, but you don't want moisture getting trapped between the tiles and the floor.
"The advantage to not doing the urethane is they become portable, so you can take them with you. Or if there's a big spill, you can pick up the floor tiles, clean them and under them, then put 'em back down if there's something like a couple-quart oil spill in the garage."
SQUARE TALK: Determine the center of your shop, then make a four-square pattern (or a plus sign that extends far enough) to measure distances to the walls, and be sure you're starting in the middle. Build off that to have a nicely fitting installation. A soft-blow hammer is excellent for tapping the interlocking tiles into place.
SOURCE:
American Garage Floor
1808 South Crosslakes, Suite D
Anderson, IN 46012
800-401-4537
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