"dadiOH" wrote in message
news:zsm4e.24076$k66.12579@trnddc03...
Won't dry in how long? Gotta remember that Saltillo is very
porous...one tile can suck up a pint of liquid.
I have to admit, I'm pretty impatient with the drying. I was only giving it
a couple of hours.
Trouble is, part of the tile was dry pretty quickly and the rest of it
(spotty areas) wouldn't dry.
I headed out for a couple of hours and when I came back they had dried. I'm
in NM where water
doesn't stand a chance just sitting around
I've never tried stripping any of the Saltillo I laid in my house, never
would, no idea what would happen with the residual stripper soaked into
it. Not to mention the original sealer and topcoat which I kinda doubt
can ever be totally removed.
Saltillo stripping is pretty common here given the sheer amount of the
stuff.
I suspect you're right that you'll never get all the sealer off but now that
I've got
a system down, you really wouldn't know the stripped tiles ever had a sealer
on them. They suck up water just like raw ones.
After laying, I seal it with a locally made acrylic sealer (SealCrete)
then topcoat (3-4 coats) with oil poly. I use the sealer because it is
only $12/gallon, the tile dries with nearly the natural color and the
oil poly doesn't darken it as it would if the tile weren't already
sealed (one could get the same color results using just water poly but
the tile would suck up a lot if not already sealed). When it wears, I
do the same thing in the worn areas. Works well for me, been doing it
for ten years.
I'm using the HD off the shelf stuff, Miracle Sealants Penetrating finish
followed by
their High Gloss Sealer. I just finished laying 150 sf of the stuff and
finished this way.
Trouble is, their new stuff contains a color enhancer. I put down 400 sf of
the stuff
last summer and it didn't contain this. So now I have a serious mismatch
going on so hence
all the stripping (not to mention, a lot of sf worth of 12 year old stuff
that was never
maintained). So my work is cut out for me for the next several weekends!
I intend to then
go back and put on a few coats of MexSeal which seems to be the best stuff
around these
parts anyway.
Cheers and thanks for the inputs!
cc