System · Flake systems
Flake systems, the floor that hides what a floor collects
Vinyl chip broadcast into wet epoxy, scraped back and sealed under urethane. The blend breaks up the surface so tire marks, dust and future patch repairs stop reading as damage — which is most of what makes a working shop floor look tired.
Flake systems at a glance
- Best for
- Service shops, showrooms, locker rooms, garages
- Build
- Full broadcast, double-scraped, two urethane coats
- Finish
- Light orange-peel texture
- Blends
- Any chip size and color combination
What it actually is
Coloured vinyl chip is thrown into a wet epoxy base coat until the surface takes no more, left to cure, then scraped and ground back so the raised edges of every chip come off flat. Two urethane coats go over that. The chip is not decoration sitting on top of the floor; it is embedded through the build and ground into the wear surface.
Blend is a real specification, not a swatch choice. Chip size and colour mix control how much the floor disguises — a larger chip in a high-contrast blend hides a great deal, a fine chip in a tight tonal range reads almost as a solid colour with texture. The blend is chosen against what the floor is going to collect.
Where it belongs
Service shops, dealership showrooms and write-up lanes, locker rooms, restrooms, garages, light commercial and anywhere a floor is on show but is going to be worked on. The double urethane seal is what makes it viable in a wet room as well as a dry one.
It is the practical middle of the range: more forgiving and more finished-looking than solid colour epoxy, less thickness and less cost than a double quartz broadcast. Where a floor needs to look good for years without being babied, this is usually the honest specification.
Where it does not belong
Not under thermal shock or aggressive wash-down — the base is epoxy and the same rigidity limit applies as to any epoxy film. Steam cleaning and thermal cycling belong to urethane cement.
Not where heavy point loads and impact are the governing case either. A flake build is thinner than a double quartz broadcast, and it will telegraph impact that quartz absorbs. And not over an unresolved moisture problem, for the same non-permeable reason as any epoxy.
Thickness, cure and return to service
A full broadcast typically finishes somewhere between 20 and 40 mils once ground back and sealed — thicker than a rolled coating, thinner than a quartz mortar. The ground texture gives a light orange-peel underfoot that holds traction without feeling abrasive.
The build is sequential: base coat and broadcast, cure, scrape and grind, then two urethane coats with cure between them. That usually means a multi-day window rather than an overnight, and foot traffic back the day after the final coat.
The prep it demands
Diamond grinding to an ICRI 310.2R profile, contaminated concrete removed rather than coated over, cracks routed and filled, spalls patched. Moisture verified to ASTM F2170 or F1869 before anything is opened.
On a shop floor the prep is usually the larger half of the job, because what is being ground off is years of oil that has soaked into open concrete. Resin does not bond to oil, and no primer sold has ever changed that.
What we bring to it
Any chip size and colour combination, blended to what the floor has to hide rather than to what a distributor happens to stock — a consequence of making our own resin and mixing to spec.
We run our own dust-collected grinders, which is what lets the prep stage happen inside a shop that is still taking cars, and we schedule the cure days around your week rather than around ours. Night and weekend shifts are normal here, not a surcharge.
Who specifies it
Where flake systems gets called for
Dealerships & service shops
The blend hides tire marks and wear, and the ground texture holds traction in a wet bay.
Warehouse & logistics
Break rooms, restrooms and office areas inside a distribution building, where appearance leads.
Day, night and weekend shifts. Estimates are free. Covering Midwest, East Coast and Southern states — out of Chicagoland, with finished floors in Gurnee, Kenosha, Milwaukee and Chicago.
The other five systems
Finished floors near you
Specifying flake systems?
Tell us the square footage, the traffic and the downtime window. Estimates are free.