Have your natural stone floors lost their shine? Are they stained, scratched, etched or otherwise damaged? How about your tile and grout floors — are those grout lines a lot darker than when the floor was first installed? 

 

There are a few basic methods used today to create a shine on natural stone floors including buffing with Marble polishing powders and compounds, grinding with diamond abrasives and crystallization.

Each method may not be effective on all stone types and the use of more than one may be necessary.

Stains removal: We use different methods between diamond spray pads and poultice to remove food, drink or rust stains.

Cracks and holes repair: We fill cracks and holes with epoxy resin with matching colour and then we sand it down and re-polish to match the stone.

Grout clean: We clean each grout line with specially designed grout brush and suitable grout cleaning solution.

Sealing: We always use solvent sealer on marble tiles. It penetrates tile while leaving the surface looking natural.

Polishing Powders: Fine grains of aluminium or tin oxide abrasive powder that are buffed or rubbed on the surface of the stone to create the shine.

This process is actually the same as sanding with diamonds except that the powder is a much finer abrasive. This process is most often augmented by the addition of oxalic acid or oxalate to create a reaction similar to crystallization.

The powder is put on the surface and wet with water to make a paste or slurry that is buffed into the stone with 175 rpm weighted floor machine and a hogs hair or white pad.

Grinding with Diamond Abrasives: Done by grinding the surface of the stone with various grits of industrial grade diamonds that are usual in three to four inch diameter pads or discs. Three to six discs are placed on the bottom of a floor machine drive plate and held on with Velcro and sand the stone surface with the diamonds to remove scratches. The process is repeated with finer grits of diamond until a mechanical shine is achieved.

Crystallization: A process in which a chemical called fluorosilicate is sprayed on to the stone buffed in with steel wool pads causing new, glassy like, crystals to be formed on the surface. A standard 175 rpm floor machine with a special heavy drive plate is used to create the heat and friction needed to form and polish the crystals.