Surface Preparation

Start with what is on the slab and what has to be on it when you are finished. Coatings, glue and mastic come off with PCD tooling. Bare concrete that needs flattening starts with metal-bond diamond. From there you step up through the grits to whatever profile the coating or polish specification calls for. Tell us the slab and the finish and we will lay out the steps.

Metal-bond diamond is the cutting stage: leveling, flattening and grinding concrete. PCD is the stripping stage, shearing sticky coatings off the slab instead of loading up with them the way a diamond segment does. Resin and hybrid pads are the refining and polishing stage. Nearly every job uses them in that order.

Inversely to the concrete: soft bond on hard concrete, hard bond on soft or abrasive concrete. Our metal-bond tooling is color coded so this is quick on site, with gray and yellow as the soft and extreme soft bonds, black as medium and purple as the extreme hard bond. Getting it backwards is the most common reason tooling either glazes over or wears out in an afternoon.

In most cases yes. We manufacture tooling to fit the common ride-on and walk-behind machines, including Lavina®, HTC®, WerkMaster™, STI® and Husqvarna® style plates, and we stock universal magnetic plates and plate accessories as well. These are World Diamond Source tools built to fit those machines, not OEM parts. Tell us your grinder and we will confirm the plate.

Dry grinding and cutting concrete puts you over the permissible exposure limit for respirable crystalline silica quickly. Use a shroud and a vacuum rated for silica on hand tools, run dust extraction on ride-on and walk-behind machines, or work wet. Table 1 of the OSHA silica standard sets out the controls expected for each of these tasks.