425mm Floor Pads

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425mm Floor Pads

425mm Floor Pads used on scrubbing machines for polishing, buffing, scrubbing & stripping of floors.

Seasoned floor maintenance personnel understand how to specify the correct floor pad for the most efficient polishing, buffing, scrubbing and stripping procedures.

If you are not familiar with which pad is used for which job, below is some great information that will point you in the right direction, ensuring you do not waste your time and money on a pad that is too weak for the application at hand, deeming the pad useless for the job. The information below will also ensure you do not purchase a pad that is too aggressive, causing problems that will require extensive remediation.

PAD TYPES

An industry standard colour-coding system for low-speed floor pads helps bring some logic to the situation. In general, moving from light to dark, least-coarse to most aggressive, are:

Pink, white, beige, red, blue, green & black.

BUFFING PADS

Buffing pads are lightest in colour and remove scuff marks and dirt within floors. Buffing lifts the dirt and brings a semi-gloss back to the wax.

A buffer (or swing machine) used at 175 to 600 rpm is often used with a buffer or polish pad, which are typically synthetic or microfiber and ranging from pink - white - beige. Beige being your most aggressive buffing pad.

CLEANING PADS

Cleaning pads are designed to clean a little more aggressively than buffing pads, and remove dirt off of a floor’s surface without removing the finish on the surface of the floor. Depending on traffic, some technicians follow this up with burnishing/polishing, using a slightly more aggressive pad during wet or wintry weather to help get the job done in a timely manner.

To save on labor, many facilities are using harder finishes on their floors. These finishes can have layers scrubbed off and polished to look like new, which extends the time between more intensive stripping and recoating.

It can be up to five times less expensive to scrub and recoat vs. strip and recoat your flooring. The pad cost is 1 - 2% of the cost of the job; the majority of cost (80 - 90%) is labor. We try to encourage customers to practice "scrub and recoat" more frequently to extend the amount of time between stripping and refinishing.

How often a cleaning crew needs to scrub depends on traffic and floor finish. Areas with high traffic such as shopping malls, factories, warehouses, etc. will have harder finishes to ensure the length between stripping is further apart. Once soil and dirt is embedded in the floor finish, the floor will have a yellowish appearance and/or visible traffic lanes.

Red pads are th most commoonly used cleaning pads, as they are not too aggressive. The blue or green scrub pad will remove one to two coats, giving the floor a uniform, dull surface. Then users can apply another coat or two of floor finish.

STRIPPING PADS

To remove more coats of wax, users turn to stripping pads which are darker in color.

Stripping pads with open weaves can resist loading up with finish, so the pad can do its job, not float on the surface. You can remove four to six coats of finish with a very strong floor stripping chemical.

Stripping pads are made to be reused. Rinsed with high-pressure jets, or more commonly on site in a dedicated washing machine/area and air-dried. This can be a greener alternative than disposing of them after one use. When stripping floors, put used pads into a plastic bag so they don’t dry out and harden prior to cleaning them.Depending on the pad’s quality, it can strip up to 50,000 square feet before losing its effectiveness.

Other tips for longevity include using both sides of the pad, brushing it gently during rinsing, and taking it off the machine when it’s not in use.

HIGH-SPEED BURNISHING PADS

High-speed burnishing machines run at 1,000 to 3,000 rpm and apply more heat and pressure to the floor to remove wax.

The high-speed pads are where it begins to get a bit more complex, primarily due to machine speeds and floor finishes being used.

Different facilities require different waxes. For example, gym floors use a water-based wax that can be removed quickly. Grocery stores require harder waxes to withstand shoes, carts and palettes. Different waxes will require different pads.

An electric burnisher creates up to 2,000 rpm, but has little downward pressure. Battery-powered machinery create a higher rpm and more brush pressure, and propane machines creates the maximum rpm and the most downward pressure. Machine type and floor finish will determine the best pad to complete the system.

Floor Pad Composition:

Most floor pads are a composition of synthetic and natural fibers. Synthetics such as nylon and polyester create softer pads, while natural fiber content (hog hair, coconut, walnut, etc.) creates a coarser, more aggressive pad.

The reason hog bristle works better than other natural fibers, is because it’s hollow and can heat up and cool down.

Hair is also biodegradable, and some say it’s green for that reason, but others say feel that’s cancelled out by the processing needed to acquire the hair.

High hair content can also create a burning hair odor when used with high-speed applications. On the upside, heavy hair can generate more heat so you can burnish harder waxes more efficiently.

Synthetics can be manipulated in different ways. To act like heavy hair, the manufacturer can change fiber deniers and latex binders which makes the pad heavier. A 5 denier is pretty thin, a 50 denier is a lot heavier and will be a hardier product.

The best area of use for a totally synthetic pad is at low-speed jobs for scrubbing or stripping with wet solutions. Blended natural fiber pads are best used with ultra high-speed burnishing. You can use a totally synthetic pad for burnishing, but it will take longer to remove black marks, scratches, and give the gloss of a natural fiber blend pad.

Microfiber is another synthetic that is often blended into floor pads.

Microfiber pads are excellent for daily cleaning or burnishingas they don’t create dust when burnishing because they don’t micro abrade. A downside can be cost, but they’re easily cleaned and readily reused. Also, while microfiber won’t decompose quickly in a landfill, users can reduce the harshness of the chemical and rely on the fiber to clean.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PADS

The advent of floor pads that work without the use of chemicals has possibly been the major recent breakthrough in the floor pad market. Such pads enable stone, tile, marble and terrazzo floors to be maintained and polished without the use of floor finishes and strippers. Eliminating the use of chemicals provides huge benefits since it not only improves the sustainability of the cleaning system, it also increases staff safety and removes the chemical cost element from
the equation.

Before choosing a floor pad, users need to determine the hardness of the finish, the frequency of care, the equipment, and the chemical being used. It’s a recipe that can be fine-tuned until an end-user knows exactly what works for their needs.

However, customers must be careful to ensure that they choose the right floor pad for the floor in question. Sometimes the reasons for this is obvious since an aggressive black pad for stripping would potentially scratch a delicate floor surface beyond repair, while a floor pad for polishing would have little effect on a badly damaged floor from which sealants and black marks would need to be removed. But in some cases – for example, when it comes to the differences between polishing pads – the variations between each are more subtle. Here an expert in floorcare would be able to advise the customer on which pad to use where for optimum results and cost-effectiveness.

It is true to say that at first glance many customers might be confused at the fact that floor pads literally come in a complete spectrum of options. But the tradition of colour-coding floor pads in industry means that cleaning and maintenance operatives quickly become accustomed to which colour to use where, even when the language barrier may be an issue. Many manufacturers offer an illustrated guide to their products and include information on which types of floor each pad should be used plus the speeds at which the relevant machine should be set and the type of floor finish that can be expected afterwards.

Despite the many developments and new products in the floor pad market, some of the original elements remain and black is still synonymous with stripping. 3M’s own black pad uses a blend of synthetic fibres laid out in an open textured non-woven construction. This helps to increase friction on the floor while providing the ability to remove black marks and stains.

The green pad for scrubbing consists mainly of nylon fibres in an open-textured construction bonded with a synthetic adhesive. The pad can be used with standard-speed rotary floor machines or automatic scrubber dryers and can be employed for the daily wet scrubbing of non-protected hard floors. The green pad is also used to prepare hard floors for recoating with floor finish and for stripping soft floors such as linoleum or soft vinyl.

Tan floor pads are still used for polishing with the use of a blend of natural and synthetic fibres to remove scuffs and marks while also providing a good gloss finish.

However, polishing today has become a much more complex business and instead of simply offering one pad, manufacturers now offer a whole array of floor pad options depending on the type of floor in question and the level of gloss required. For example, 3M has a pink floor pad that removes scuffs and marks from harder finishes in high traffic areas plus a blue pad for the frequent burnishing of dull floors and purple and sienna pads for polishing floor surfaces such as marble, concrete and terrazzo.

HISTORY OF THE FLOOR PAD

When the first floor pads were developed by 3M in the 1950s they actually evolved as a by-product of other inventions. But the real story of the floor pad actually began long before that.

It was in 1938 when Al Boese, an employee at 3M’s tape lab, was told by his boss that the company was seeking an inexpensive, non-corrosive, non-woven backing solution for its electrical tape product. However, the only non-corrosive backing that anyone knew of at that time was a synthetic acetate cloth that had not been covered by a 3M patent.

So Boese spent many months studying fibres and conducting various experiments aimed at binding them together without weaving them. Eventually he hit on the solution of applying heat and pressure to the fibres.

The product that Boese developed in 1950 on the back of this discovery was not, in fact, an improved backing for electrical tape but a strong decorative ribbon with a surface sheen. This was an immediate hit when it was first introduced and meant 3M had not only created a new product - but also a new market for gift-wrapping materials to go with it.

In 1958 3M went on to combine an evolved version of this non-woven material with its own abrasives, which were distributed uniformly throughout the pad to produce Scotch-Brite scrubbing and polishing pads. And the rest, as they say, is history.

This ‘accidental’ development of the floor pad is typical of 3M’s strategy to explore new technologies and come up with innovative products as a result. The company has a policy of allowing its employees to experiment and develop new products they were not necessarily looking for. Another example of this is Tambocor, a major heart anti-arrhythmic drug introduced in 1982 purely because the company began exploring new applications for its proprietary fluorochemical technology.

Of course, floor cleaning machines did exist before the 1950s but these tended to be fitted with pads made from steel wool. This was not an ideal material to use since steel wool is both aggressive and prone to rust while offering limited durability. 3M discovered that by combining a durable, non-woven material in various formats with a range of different abrasives, an entire line of floor pads could be created for various cleaning and polishing machines that could be used on many different types of floors.

WHAT IS A FLOOR PAD MADE OF?

There are three main elements to a floor pad: the non-woven fibres; the abrasive surface, and the adhesive that binds the two together. The fibres are key to determining the application of the pad and various materials are used in their construction. These include polyester, nylon and polyamide as well as several types of natural fibres. The size and length of the fibres within the non-woven material and the diameter of the pad itself also help to adapt the pad for use in different applications.

Abrasives - the scouring particles – were originally only available in powder form. These are carefully selected for their size, shape and hardness and can be made of a huge variety of substances including corundum, silicium carbide and talc. The abrasive surface is made up of these particles of varying sizes that are mixed together and glued into the resin.

The adhesive, or resin, links the fibres together and strengthens the entire structure. A good resin will adhere strongly to the fibres and offer a high level of water resistance. It will also provide a coating to protect the fibres from chemical cleaning agents since harsh chemicals may stiffen the fibres and reduce the life of the pad. Another key function of the resin is to adhere the abrasives to the fibres.