Every piece of sandstone is unique because sandstone is made up of grains of sand and one of a few binders, such as silica, calcite, iron oxides, or clay minerals. One can be more or less hard or porous than the next. Sandstone is not an extremely hard stone, to begin with, but it is beautiful when its blacks, grays, yellows, whites, browns, and reds reflect in the light.
With sandstone, each piece's hardness is determined by the type of cement and the clast or size of the grains of sand. In sandstone, the sand is anywhere from 0.06 to 2 millimeters in diameter. If you touch sandstone, it feels gritty. The texture runs from soft to relatively hard. The hard sandstone is used for all types of construction, including road work, but the soft sandstone is essentially useless.
One of the most common uses for sandstone is sandstone tiles used for floors and walls in bathrooms and kitchens. This beautiful stone gives a lavish look to any home. You may be wondering how to make sandstone shiny. Some shine their sandstone, some don't. If you want to know how — here, you can read about the Different Techniques to Make Sandstone Shiny.
One thing you can use for polishing sandstone is diamond grinding. For this type of polishing, an industrial-grade diamond grit disc or pad is used.
They are 3 to 4 inches wide, and 3 to 6 of them are attached to the drive plate of a floor machine. As the machine passes over an area, the pads sand out scratches in the stone floor.
The floor is polished several times, and each time, a finer grit of diamond is used until the right shine is achieved. This makes for a gorgeous floor. It does, however, take a long time. Also, lippage can cause real problems with this method.
How to make sandstone shiny — that is a question that owners ponder all the time. Stone floor buffing is another answer. Stone buffing uses an abrasive powder consisting of fine grains of tin oxide or aluminum.
It is used as a paste. It is buffed onto the surface of the stone with a floor machine. There are essentially two differences between diamond grinding and stone buffing.
First, the stone buffing powder is quite a bit finer than that used in diamond grinding. Second, the pad used to buff it onto the surface of the floor is made of a white pad or hot hair pad, which usually uses gorilla or hogs' hair.
Stone floor buffing can leave a beautiful shine on a sandstone floor, but it cannot remove substantial scratches.
Stone floor grinding works differently according to how damaged the sandstone floor is. It uses sandpaper of different grits to achieve its shine.
A grinder can be used wet, or it can be used dry to grind the stone's surface. Either way, it is done to rid the surface of imperfections, like deep scratches, heaving, and chipping.
The preferred method is dry grinding, as it takes less time and makes less mess. Often, though, wet grinding is used if, say, the stones are uneven, but it is a tricky process.
Wet grinding can cause splashing of excess water, which makes it messy. This is why it is not the preferred method.
How to make sandstone shiny — are you still up in the air about it. How about stone floor honing?
Stone floor honing is not like stone floor grinding. Stone floor honing relies on water combined with diamond abrasives. This combination is used to hone the surface of the sandstone.
Understand that this is about the best thing you can do for your sandstone floor. It is great at removing deep scratches and restoring damaged floors.
It doesn't quite create the shine of some other methods, but you can't achieve the shine of other stones with sandstone anyway. A soft sheen is perfection for sandstone.
Yes, it is a lot of work to keep up your sandstone flooring, but after all, is it not gorgeous? Is it not worth it? If you don't want to do the labor yourself, Contact Prestige Stone Restoration Today. We'll be happy to give you a Free Estimate on restoring your sandstone surfaces. We restore marble, granite, quartz, terrazzo, limestone, travertine, and more to their original beauty, as well.
