A heavy-duty mastic flooring system from a.b.e.® was used to seal flooring at the Cold Harvest cold storage facility in Paarl.
a.b.e.®’s abe.co mastic flooring system was laid in 16mm thickness over an area of 680sq m by High Performance Floors Cape, which previously traded as The Tamick Company WP, and has over 20 years’ experience in the application of abeco mastic screeds.
Ryan Rack, Western Cape branch manager for a.b.e., says the abeco screeds were applied to seal the floors in Cold Harvest’s new Controlled Atmospheric (CA) pressure stores. “The joints in the floor were sealed with a torched-on layer of a.b.e.’s Index Fidia P 4mm non-woven polyester reinforcement prior to the application of the abeco mastic, with a.b.e.’s flintkote 3, used as binder,” Rack says.
“ abe.co mastic has been successfully used in numerous flooring applications, such as ABSA Capital (Tiber House) parking garage in Sandton, and a.b.e.®’s own warehouse in Boksburg. The product has around 50 years of service history on the SA market with single flooring areas of over 10 000sq m not uncommon. It has been installed in warehouses, railway platforms, heavily trafficked corridors, factories, goods sheds and cold rooms all over South Africa,” he states.
“With abeco mastic flooring, there are no joints as any construction joints disappear after a few days of exposure to traffic.”
Alan Hooper, of the applicators, High Performance Floors Cape, said the Cold Harvest floors had to be sealed after they were converted from Relative Atmospheric (PA) pressure floors to Controlled Atmospheric (CA) pressure floors. “CA floors have to be totally seamless which called for the sealing of all the old joints in the RA floors,” Hooper explains.
Temperature, humidity, air circulation, and even lighting conditions are strictly controlled in CA cold storage areas. The dark brown colour of dried abeco mastic is therefore ideal for such areas.
Some of the other features and benefits of abeco mastic include:
- Produces a jointless, non-dusting and resilient floor surface which is non-slip, vermin-proof, damp-proof, non-flammable, and self-healing under traffic, including the heaviest loads carried on steel, plastic, or rubber-wheeled vehicles;
- Does not disintegrate and may be laid over any firm, sound, clean sub-flooring including concrete, asphalt, well-compacted crusher run, steel and timber;
- abeco mastic makes an excellent repair material for potholed, damaged, or ravelled concrete floors. Patching carried out on a Saturday morning is usually available for full operation on the following Monday morning with no danger of the patching pulling out.
abe.co mastic floors can normally be kept clean simply by washing down with detergent and water. The floors can also be waxed using an emulsion-based floor wax.