Old school concrete finishing vs modern methods at our shop

I learned from an old timer in Calgary back in 2005 who swore by wooden floats and a lot of elbow grease for smooth finishes. Now we use power trowels with plastic blades and get the same result in half the time. The question is whether we lost something by skipping the hand work. Does the final product actually hold up better one way or the other? Anyone else made this switch and noticed a difference in durability?

2 comments

2 Comments

shane_williams8h ago

Damn, that's a solid question man. I gotta ask though - when you say plastic blades, are we talking the hard plastic ones or the softer flex type? Because I've seen guys swap to power trowels and get alright results, but then they never adjust the pitch or speed for different curing stages. That hand float work gave you feel for the concrete telling you when to back off or hit it harder. I wonder if the durability difference is more about missing that instinct versus the tool itself. What's your crew's average experience level looking like now compared to back when you had that old timer around?

henrys7417m ago

That Calgary old timer you mentioned, I bet he was one of the guys who could read the concrete like a book just by how the float felt in his hands. I worked with a crew around 2010 in Winnipeg who switched over to power trowels and honestly, the floors we finished then are still some of the flattest I've seen ten years later. @shane_williams I get what you're saying about losing that instinct, but I think the real trick is training guys to understand the concrete curing stages using the machine instead of fighting it. The plastic blades, hard ones by the way, just let us cover more ground while the concrete is still in that sweet spot for finishing. I've never seen a durability problem from using power trowels, at least not when the mix design and curing schedule are done right.