Battling It Out At Quasar

I’m currently involved with an installation in a ten pin bowling club, overlaying 500 metres of a resin floor. It was full of trowel marks and as the natural light came in via floor to ceiling glass doors, the overall affect was making the bowlers seasick.

A colleague mentioned a leading manufacturer of smoothing compounds had recently launched two ammonia free products so I thought I’d carry out a bit of research and use the new screed on my project.

The club was to remain open during the installation so the work had to be phased and broken up into areas that I could prepare and install before moving on to the next section. As I was doing the work alone, I chose a section of about 100 metres out of the main area as a starting point.

The job was soon underway and I started cleaning and priming my allotted area getting it ready for the application of the latex.

Some years ago, I made a little flat bed truck about half a metre square from a piece of inch plywood and four supermarket trolley wheels and it’s perfect for moving heavy loads without too much difficulty.

I loaded it up with eight bags of screed one on top of the other and made my way over to the area I was working on. But I needed to go through the club’s Quasar arena several times a day to collect materials.

Now for those who have so far resisted the urge of Quasar, let me set the scene.

Your average arena is very dark, the only light coming from a couple of 10 watt ultra violet tubes high in the ceiling. It’s very hot and noisy, with eardrum bursting music blaring out of speakers the size of double decker buses. Every now and then, you catch a glimpse of a fluorescent yellow or orange space suited figure as one of the starship troopers dives from the cover of darkness and back again before one of the opposing gang of marauding space bandits can get a clear shot of him.

Anyway during one such encounter, I had to pass through this darkened battleground to the storeroom on the other side to get some screed. The outward journey passed without incident and I made it to the storeroom with no hassle. On the way back, though, I had an unfortunate run in with Flash Gordon, decked in a fluorescent yellow jump suit, my trolley went over his foot.

The rest of the job went well and without major incident but to get to the main point, the new screed was a pleasure to use, very low odour and virtually self-levelling.

Setting time particularly in the heat was an hour or so and not a trowel mark was to be seen. The product was perfectly dry by the next day even at 4/5 mm thicknesses, which is what was needed on this job to loose the undulations in the resin floor underneath. I did use a spiked roller on it though, which paid dividends.

Until the next time, “May the floors be with you”

This article first appeared in the October 2006 edition of the CFJ.