How to operate a concrete finishing machine (power trowel)

so the very first thing you need to figure out is when you can put the trowel machine on the slab so as you can tell they're only sinking about a quarter inch at most into the concrete i like to get on there when you can only think about an eighth of an inch but this is a small trial machine this is 36 so you can get on a little wetter you can see out here the rest of it it's a it's just too wet out here so this is one of the challenges you can see here my fingers are not really sinking in but then when you get out here my fingers sink way more so this one's not ready for the trial machine that one is so this is one of the challenges that we face because the trucks we are 45 minutes away from the plant so they are very inconsistent sometimes as you can tell so what he's going to do he's going to run the pan and you want to do kind of like a like this this pattern you want to go this way and then you turn and then you come back right through the center again and then you follow the same pattern over and over over the whole slab whenever you're done with that then you do it the other way perpendicular like this all right so keep an eye on that because that's that's the pattern that he's going to follow now the speed is another thing that you need to keep in mind when you start off if you don't have a float pan maybe the only thing you have is combination blades that's fine just run them as flat as possible if you try to pitch the blades too much you're gonna you're gonna scrape some of the cream that's on the surface and then you're gonna make your uh your slab uneven so right now what he's focusing on is getting this aggregate which is below the surface nice and flat the surface is gonna look pretty bad right now that's okay don't worry about that right now run your blades really really flat the other thing that you need to keep in mind is you could not trowel while you still have bleed water on the surface what happens you'll end up trapping that water and you could potentially cause the lamination so with the float band it's not as critical because the float band really opens up the surface so it's harder to trap bleed water with a flow fan but it's still not a good practice he's kind of getting to where the bleed water is he's gonna turn around and come right back to the middle so the way you move the trial machine back and forth is you lift or lower the handle if you lift the handle it's going to go left if you lower the handle it goes to the right see right there you see him it's hard to see but he's actually lifting on the handle slightly and that makes the machine go left of course we have to keep it in mind that the uh the blades on the straw machine they turn clockwise if they turn counterclockwise for whatever reason then the handle you're gonna have to do the opposite all right so now he's going perpendicular to the previous pass still maintaining the same pattern there's a ton of different blades that you can use you're technically not polishing concrete but you're trying to do the same thing okay you're just making the the surface tighter and tighter and that's how you end up getting it slicker however on the first couple of passes you are not worried about the surface you are simply trying to get that aggregate which is below the surface you're trying to get that nice and flat different types of blades that you can use i prefer the float pen because this has the largest surface area and it just does a much better job than anything else what makes the float band so good is that if you have a low spot it's simply going to bridge over it it's not going to follow the low spot it's going to bridge over and you're going to actually feel the low spot and if you have a high spot you have so much friction that it's going to cut it down so it's going to take the highs from the highs and put them in the lows you end up with a much flatter slab so the next best thing that you can use if you don't have a floating pan is get you some floating shoes the floating shoes attach to your current blades whether it be a finishing blades or combination blades and they're just a larger surface okay so they just make it bigger and again you're just trying to get as much surface area on those blades as possible so that you can flatten the aggregate all right if you don't have a float pan or float shoes the next best thing is combination blades combination blades are meant like the name implies as a combination you can float and finish with them that's why they're not really the best at either but if you only have one set of blades and one trial machine then you want to put combination blades on that thing okay from better to worse you have float pen then you have float shoes then you have combination blades and then you have finishing blades the finishing blades are just meant to finish they're very narrow that and you'll see kind of the progression as as you go from float to finish the blades just keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller so by the time you get your finishing blades on there that slab is already pretty hard and you're not really going to mark it with your as you walk on it maybe just slightly and you're going to be pitching those blades pretty steep that's what's going to really start making your your surface tight and start to make it shine you can do that with the combination blades as well it's just not going to be as tight as if you had finishing blades but i actually don't like my slabs to be finished as tight because most of my slabs we stain or seal and you don't want a super tight slab when you're trying to seal it after that you get into specialty blades you get into you know your poly blades and then you have blue steel blades and then you have stainless steel blades and then just all kinds of different blades that you can use but as you guys know we use the poly blades for finishing concrete that's gonna be stained or if we add color to the concrete then we definitely want to use the uh the poly blades because they're not gonna burnish the the concrete you're just not gonna get those burn marks like you would with a steel blade so anyway this is just a crash course on finishing blades there's all kinds of different companies that make them we use wagman steel they have a huge variety of blades so anyway that's what we use but there's just all kinds types of blades and and there's also some that are meant only for riders uh ryder trout machines these these are just really big trout machines that you ride on instead of walk behind everything that we use here is walk behinds but every now and then we'll use riders and those are a lot heavier so they use a much heavier duty blade all right so this is the trial machine that we're gonna put on the slab now this is an mbw f46 this is the high torque version it has a cvt clutch it also has a quick pitch or they call it an easy pitch and that's going to come in handy for pitching the blades you can pitch the blades as you're finishing the concrete like that see that you don't want to pitch them that high especially not at the beginning you're going to only pitch them up that high towards the end when just trying to burnish the concrete right now we're going to put on the slab and we're gonna pitch it very little almost nothing because we're still trying to flatten the the slab the pan just got done so now we're gonna do uh this one the rest of the slab still not quite ready for uh for the combo blades however this side is so we're going to put the uh trial machine on here the mbw with the combo blades we're going to give it a couple of passes and we're just going to progress as needed then when that side is done we're going to take that trial machine bring it over here and do the rest of it so that's why it's a good idea to have multiple machines obviously if you only have one then that's where it really comes in handy to have combo blades because then you can do that side over there then you can come over here pitch up the blades more as needed now the other thing if you only had one machine you could also have float shoes on the blades and then you can take them off do this put them back on do that and back and forth it's kind of a pain you know if you want a flatter slab that's what you're gonna have to do or like we do we have more than one trial machine run the pen with one float with the other ones and if it's a bigger slab then we finish with another one first things first turn on your switch here different trial machines have different versions of it so just make sure you turn that on make sure your blades are flat so put it all the way down and then just fire it up like normal all right and just do your gas slightly you don't want to go too too hard too fast too soon and you see me shaking it like this sometimes the blades will stick and uh you want to shake it a little bit see there it goes all right so it's too flat so i'm going to pitch the blades up slightly there it is the last place that he did he went this way so i'm gonna go across perpendicular let's put the blades up a little more and what you're looking for is make sure that you seal the concrete right there it's sealing pretty well that's what you want it's getting a little wet over here i'm going to go back go this way and again you want to make sure that you don't leave any voids at this point if you do you're gonna have a heck of a hard time covering them up later so right now is where you start to focus on the finish see there's one right there there it is gone so again this is where you're gonna start to focus on the finish see over here is a bit wet so we come around you want to do the part that's dry first otherwise you're not going to be able to seal it later if it gets away from you see right there it's not feeling well i'm going to pitch the blades a little more and it's gone so this is why i love this quick pitch setup all right there's a spot right there i need to make sure that it seals all right there it is keep going just follow the same pattern get to where it's wet come back follow the same pattern and of course because you're walking on the slab you're having to cover up your own your own footprints that's obviously the downside of a walk behind so i'm going to slow it down because concrete's a little wetter over here so i'm going to slow it down maybe flatten out the blades a little more see that right there gotta make sure all that gets covered up so yeah i'm getting to the wet spot so now i moved over to the side and i'm going to step over here so i don't wanna i don't wanna put footprints over there but i'm not gonna be able to cover up right now walk it back all right now we're going to go and do the rest of it okay again perpendicular here it's a little wetter so i'm going to slow down the trowel machine by the way in order for me to make it go left i lift you see that right there if i lift it goes pretty fast you don't want to go too fast and see if you go to go to the right i push down it's hard to show you but i'm pushing down slightly the machine will try to go left to right on its own it's going right to left that takes a little bit more uh more effort because the weight of the handle is this way towards me so it's already pushing down on it but anyway you notice that i slowed it down it's doing a really nice job right now covering up all the holes see we have a little too much bleed water here on the edge i'm gonna get the guys to pull that off the slab so i don't want to i don't want to take this trowel machine over there where the beet water is because like i said there's always the uh the chance that i'll trap some of that bleed water and then the slab will be laminate if you hit it just right like i'm doing right now it's very easy to do to cover up all the all the holes my footprints all that good stuff if you wait too long the concrete's gonna get hard and then you're not going to be able to get rid of those footprints as easily and that's when you start falling behind and once you start falling behind concrete wait for no one concrete's still going to set up so if you fall behind you're going to have it you're going to have a heck of a hard time catching up that's why i prefer these uh high rpm trial machines you don't have to use it every time but if you need it it's there i like to keep my lines really straight that's just me i think it looks better you're not going to see it the whole idea is you don't want to see your lines when you're done finishing however as i am finishing i like to keep my lines nice and straight keep a nice pattern and if we look back you can tell where i walk it's it's pretty soft right there so i'm probably going to do just this one last fast and uh and then just kind of go back to the beginning and see how wet it is if it's uh if it's still too wet i'll wait if not i'll give it another pass i added some day one on this area right here trying to slow it down so that uh we can let the other one catch up you can see over here he's going over with the floating pan again it's just we got some very inconsistent mix today on this pour as you can tell so that's where you really have to know what you're doing otherwise you you can really ruin a slab because as you saw i can't just go all the way across i have to kind of pick and choose the spots that are ready and that makes it super difficult so anyway i'm gonna let this sit up a little longer and then i'll hit it again so he's going slow making sure he covers up all the holes on the concrete because like i said earlier if you don't cover them up right now while the conqueror's still plastic once it hardens up it's going to be a nightmare and more likely you're not going to be able to cover them up especially the sun's starting to come out and man once that concrete blows up we call it blowing up or hitting when it when it hits that means it just seems like it won't dry one dry won't dry and all of a sudden it just it just hits real hard and it starts to dry real fast if that happens to you and you have not been covering up your pin holes and all that on the surface you'll fall so far behind so or the other thing that people tend to do is they'll start putting water on the surface to bring up more cream to cover up those holes that's bad that's that's bad deal for the concrete so anyway be careful with it [Music] all right so i just got done i floated it one more time then i gave it two passes with the combination blades you can tell i'm starting to pitch them up already quite a bit right there i should be able to tell you what's going on and that machine over there he's having to pitch those blades a lot more right now not in the spot that we're not at the spot where he's at right now because it's still a little soft but the rest of it he's having to pitch those blades real high but uh anyway i'm going to wait for these guys to do the edges now and then i'm going to hit the machine again up and down and then we're going to broom it every time you have an exterior porch or just a carport or anything that's going to be outside it needs to be sloped away from the main slab this one has a quarter inch per foot slope and also you have to uh put some kind of grip on there you can't slick it off because there's a potential for somebody's gonna fall so what we're going to do we're going to broom it we use a horsehair broom so it's just going to be a light broom finish i don't like the real coarse broom finish but anyway as soon as they're done with the edges i'm going to hit it one more time and these guys can follow right behind me with a broom and that's gonna be it for this section and now we're just gonna have to wait on the other section you can see now he's moving pretty quick all right so you saw how fast he was going awhile ago now he's going real slow because that spot is still wet so again i keep talking about that cvt clutch but the ability to turn the blades real slow with high torque or really fast it's extremely important for us it's about 105 degrees right now i don't even know what it is but it's it's hot as heck but hey this is this is what we're going to do every day for concrete and texas heat they say if you can pour concrete in texas you can pour concrete anywhere i don't know i've always only port concrete in texas but it gets plenty hot down here that's for sure all right so i myself like a pretty fine broom finish so i like to trowel at least a couple of passes with the combination blades and then it almost when it's almost too tight i like to put water on the surface run the troubleshoot one more time just to bring up cream and then broom it i find that i get the best looking broom finish doing it this way a lot of guys will just run the broom way earlier than this but i think you end up with a two course of a roof finish all right here's the finished product the front over here it is uh broom finish everything else is slicked off it's a hot one today it's over 100 degrees and i'm just so ready to go home we'll see you guys next time we are texas barn dominions give us a [Music] like [Music] you

Channel: Texas Barndominiums

Views: 472,199

Keywords: Concrete finishing, how to, diy, power trowel, trowel machine, concrete, cement, concrete slab, concrete finishing techniques, concrete tools, concrete skills, diy concrete, how to pour concrete, how to pour a concrete slab, power trowel concrete, how to power trowel concrete, how to finish concrete

Id: 1tu5_ScB-Fs

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020