How to polish concrete.
From personal experience, polishing concrete is like waking up on a Christmas morning. You don’t know what kind of surface you’re going to get until you finish the entire polishing process. I use a variable speed water fed polisher. This kind of polisher uses a regular water hose and is fed through the diamond polishing pad and it spins in a clockwise direction. I wear a rain suit, boots, ear plugs, and eye protection when I do a polishing project……and since I am dealing with electricity and water, my polisher has a GFI ( Ground Fault Interrupter ), which is designed to protect me from electrical shock . I haven’t gotten shocked yet (knock on wood).
Any time I prepare to do a polishing project, I wait at least 1 week to let the concrete cure before I start grinding the surface. Once I feel that the surface is ready and hard troweled, I usually start out with a 50 Grit diamond pad. A 50 grit diamond pad is very aggressive and will take away a lot of surface area and will reveal quite a bit of aggregate detail. Continuing with the remaining 100, 200 , 400, 800, 1200, 5000 Grits gradually yields a very smooth and lustrous surface. The surface will resemble a terrazzo surface, but with my own custom selection of aggregates such as sand, marble dust, tempered glass, wine bottle pieces, and coal slag, I am able to achieve my own desire surface treatment. Polishing concrete is almost a cathartic and therapeutic experience, because I am taking a raw surface and tranforming it into a beautiful surface.
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