Removing cork tiles from concrete slab.

[dalejw]

Spent a bit of time researching methods for removing cork tiles that had been stuck down onto a concrete slab and thought I'd share my own technique.

The cork tiles we had down had a vinyl coating on the top to make them look like ceramic tiles... go figure... This meant that they couldn't be removed by the blowtorch method as the top burned off giving an acrid black smoke.

This is how we managed to get them up.

1) Purchase a cheap shovel and hammer the end so it's a flat blade and then sharpen up to a knife edge on the bench grinder.

2) Find an edge and start to lever the tiles up with the shovel as per attached pic.

3) Pour a bit of turps onto the shovel blade so it runs down the shovel under the cork tiles. The turps then disolves the glue underneath.

4) Repeat slowly levering the tiles up, adding more turps to keep dissolving glue trying to get the cork tiles to come off in large sheets.


It should be said that this method COMPLETELY SUCKS ####!!!!!! It doesn't work very well. It took us 2 full days to remove 30sqm of tiles this way. The smell of the turps is overpowering and hangs around the house for weeks afterwards. We used nearly 25L of turps to do the 30sqm.

Can you imagine what it's like to pour 25L of turps through your house?

As the glue dissolves it goes to this sort of vaseline mixed with wet ice sort of consistency. Rubber soled shoes then go like teflon... That means you're trying to walk around on vaseline and wet ice with teflon shoes... Bruised knees and buggered wrists were inevitable. As were the chemical burns we suffered from wading around in turps for 2 days.

Large sheets of cork tiles????? No bloody way!. Some parts came up ok but most came up in pieces the size of postage stamps.

I mean the wood floors look bloody great now it's all done but I'd rather blend my dangly bits than ever try to pull up a cork floor again...

I hope others find the techniques here inspiring and usefull :D

[Larry McCully]

you shudda used a heat gun , you wooda had em up in 2 hours. and no burnie bits or smellie bits. A hair dryer is fab for this.

[dalejw]

you shudda used a heat gun , you wooda had em up in 2 hours. and no burnie bits or smellie bits. A hair dryer is fab for this.

Trust me mate... there was 3 weeks of trying different methods of getting these up. Hair dryer, heat gun, wallpaper steamer, air chisel, different solvents ... list goes on!

I have no idea what they were stuck down with but it wasn't the usual stuff. I've done a floor for a customer with a heat gun before and it was a pain in the #### but nothing like this.

This stuff was kinda like a cross between snot and epoxy :D

[Tools]

You could have hired a Kango with a floor stripping attachment.

Tools

[mic-d]

We've got cork that is now buggered because of a new kitchen footprint and it has already been sanded once, so we're looking to do something similar. But my question is why didn't you leave the cork down and floor over it? was it a height problem?

Cheers
Michael

[Dusty]

Well, Dale, my hats off to you. I reckon you've done a mighty job. The only thing I would do differently is to of used Kerosene rather than Turps.

Now that you have shared your tale of cork, I will now share mine from six weeks ago.

Like yours, it was only a thirty square metre area, but it may a well of been a hundred and thirty, it took that freakin' long to remove.

The top layer was vinyl made to look like ceramic tiles (sounds familiar) this vinyl was glued to Masonite. the Masonite in turn was both glued and stapled to a nine ~mm layer of Cork. This top layer of Cork was glued to another six~mm layer of Cork which was glued directly to the original timber flooring.

Making it worse was the fact that kitchen was built on top of all this, meaning we would be facing around about nineteen millimetres of exposed Cork and Masonite under the kickers.

So, step 1, was to get the Masonite up and then one by one remove the staples out of the cork.

Step 2, I then had to commence sanding off the first 9~mm layer of Cork and because the glue on top of this Cork was sticky it was necessary to spray Kero over it first to nullify the glue.

With the first layer of Cork removed I then found it necessary to spray kero again to kill the glue that was in between the two layers of Cork.

While this was going on, my wife, who works with me, went around the entire perimeter carefully chiseling as much of the Cork off from the edges. This saved me having to do hours of sanding with the edging machine. (God I love that woman!)

Once the Cork was up we then had to replace several rotten and damaged sections of the flooring.

The thing that made it difficult was that we couldn't go berserk with the chiseling and levering as we had to preserve the original floor and it would of been a pointless exercise do of got it all up only to of gouged and ruined the floor.

Anyway, we got it done and the clients were absolutely delighted, which for us was very satisfying, as they had been told that it would be impossible to remove by a couple of other tradesmen.

[dalejw]

You could have hired a Kango with a floor stripping attachment.

Tools

Unfortunately the interface between the concrete and cork was by far the strongest thing in this equation. When you hit it with the air hammer all you did was cut down the middle of the cork tile leaving the glue with cork bits attached. :(

Mic-d... The height was the drama. This floor runs into a couple of tiled areas and some carpeted rooms. It would have put the floor 12mm over the height of the rest of the house. Would have looked like crap.

Dusty... That takes a ##### job to a whole new level. Hope you quoted ok for that. That's the sort of job that it would be very easy to lose a couple of days on :eek: