What You Should Know About Concrete Metal Grinding

What Are Metal Bond Diamond Floor Pads?

When it comes to grinding pads you have resin pads which are primarily used for polishing and light grinding, and you have metal bonds which are primarily used for aggressive concrete grinding, coating removal, surface prep, and heavy grinding for commercial concrete and residential concrete floors.

How to Choose the Right Grit and Bond

Metal Bonds are designed specifically for the different types of concrete hardness. It is recommended to use a Mohs Scratch Test Kit to determine the hardness of the concrete. This will ensure you get the correct tool for the job. With metals, the bonds commonly come in extra soft, soft, medium, hard, and extra hard bond strengths.

As a general rule the softer the concrete the harder the bond tool you will want to use. This may sound backward, but the goal is to put the sharpest diamonds on the surface. Therefore, with hard concrete, you would want the sharpest diamonds doing the work, and would need a soft bond to expose those sharp diamonds as the bond wears away.

After you have determined which hardness of bond you need, you now need to determine grit.

Grit is designed to refine the scratch pattern. As a general rule, each consecutive grit will be about double in grit. This will allow the diamond tool to remove the scratches of the previous step.

As an example, if you start with 30 grit, the next grit would be about 60, then 120, 220, and so on. The higher the number the finer the diamonds will be and the less surface will be removed.

How Many Segments do you Need?

Another important term and section of a pad are the segments. The segment is the raised part of the tool that holds the metal bond. When referring to metals the number of segments can vary, but it is most often common to find them in one or two segments.

2 segments

The more segments you have the less head pressure you have. Therefore, with a single segment, you are putting all that pressure upon just one spot on the diamond tool. With that extra head pressure, fewer segments cut faster, whereas more segments will allow for surface refinement with fewer scratches.