Glendora Epoxy Flooring installs flake epoxy floors across Glendora, CA and the surrounding cities of Charter Oak, Citrus, San Dimas, Azusa and Covina. Flake is the most popular system we install and, on the older slabs common in this area, usually the most sensible one. It adds thickness, it adds texture, and it forgives the minor imperfections that a solid color would put on display.
The system is straightforward to describe and less straightforward to execute well. Vinyl flake is broadcast into a wet base coat, left to cure, scraped back flat and locked under a clear topcoat. Almost all of the quality difference between one flake floor and another sits in that scrape and in the preparation beneath it.
What follows is how the system is built, what the choices actually change, and where flake beats the alternatives. The differences are easier to see on a sample laid across your own slab than in any description.
How a Flake Floor Is Built
The Base Coat and Broadcasting to Refusal
Flake is broadcast into a wet pigmented base coat until the surface will not accept any more — broadcasting to refusal. Working to refusal rather than to a measured rate is what produces even coverage, because a partial broadcast leaves density variation that becomes obvious once the clear coat goes over it and the light catches it.
Scraping Back, and Why It Takes So Long
Once cured, the excess flake is scraped and vacuumed away, knocking down every chip standing proud of the surface. This is the slowest stage of the job and the one that separates a good flake floor from a rough one. A rushed scrape leaves sharp edges that are immediately obvious the first time somebody kneels or walks barefoot on the floor.
The Clear Topcoat
One or two clear coats go over the scraped surface, wetting out the flake and building the wear layer. We generally use polyaspartic here for abrasion resistance and ultraviolet stability. The number of clear coats is a specification decision: a second coat buries the flake edges further and produces a smoother, more easily cleaned surface.
Full Broadcast Against a Partial Scatter
A full broadcast covers the base color completely, giving a dense, uniform, terrazzo-like appearance. A partial or light scatter deliberately leaves base color visible between the chips for a more open look. They are genuinely different floors, and the sample needs laying on your own slab because the difference does not read from a photograph.
Choosing a Flake System
Blend, Color and Seeing It in Daylight
Flake blends are sold under names and many customers arrive knowing the one they want. What a chip in a binder under showroom lighting does not tell you is how the blend reads across a whole bay in daylight against your walls. We lay a sample on the actual slab before anything is ordered, which routinely changes the choice.
Chip Size and How the Floor Reads
Flake comes in different sizes, and the size changes the character more than most people expect. A smaller chip produces a finer, more uniform, almost speckled appearance; a larger chip gives a bolder, more broken pattern with more visual movement. Larger chips also need more clear coat to bury their edges properly.
Texture and Slip Resistance
A flake floor carries some inherent texture from the chip edges, which is one of its practical advantages over a smooth solid color and a real safety difference on a floor that gets wet. Where more grip is needed — a garage that a wet car comes into, a workshop, a covered exterior area — aluminum oxide or graded quartz is added to the topcoat at a specified rate on top of that. The rate is chosen for how the space is genuinely used rather than added as a standard extra.
Hiding an Older Slab
This is the reason flake suits this area so well. A slab that has been in service for sixty or seventy years carries patch repairs, filled cracks and minor variation that a solid color would highlight and a metallic finish would exaggerate. Flake conceals all of it while adding genuine thickness over the repairs.
Flake Against the Alternatives
Flake Against Solid Color
A solid color under a clear topcoat is cleaner and more contemporary, and it is the right answer on a good slab in a display space where the floor will be looked at. On an older slab it shows every repair, every patch and every ripple the trowel left sixty years ago. Flake costs more and hides more, and on most garages in this area that trade is worth making.
Flake Against Metallic
Metallic is more dramatic and considerably less forgiving: it highlights substrate variation rather than concealing it, shows dust and footprints more readily, and cannot be reproduced or repaired invisibly. Flake is the more practical everyday floor. Where a space is genuinely for display rather than for work, metallic earns its place.
Flake Against Bare Polished Concrete
Polishing adds nothing to the slab and cannot hide anything, so it needs concrete that is hard, sound and attractive to begin with. Flake works on concrete that is none of those things. Where a slab genuinely suits polishing, that is often the better long-term floor; where it does not, flake is the more realistic route.
Repairs and Living With a Flake Floor
Flake is the easiest decorative system to repair convincingly, because the pattern is random and a patched area blends into surrounding chips far better than it would into a solid color or a metallic vein. Day-to-day care is a neutral cleaner and a soft brush, and the texture means it holds up well to grit tracked in from a driveway.
- 20+ Years Experience
- Every Slab Moisture Tested
- Written System Spec