This article is an excerpt from Episode 14 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring veteran coatings expert Murray Heywood. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: When I’m training people that have never done grouting before, the ones that I find that are the easiest, honestly, are people who do coatings. The reason is that they're already handling paint equipment and chemicals. When you talk to some contractors they say, "Oh, my God, I got to buy an airless paint sprayer? Can't I just use a caulk gun or something?" And when you're starting off at that level, you could use cartridges and a caulk gun, but it's like showing up to do brain surgery and you've got a drill, a hammer, and a kitchen knife. It's not the right way to start off.

We did a webinar with about 50 Sherwin-Williams people. We got a number of good opportunities out of that, but one of the best ones was a flooring guy who just happened to be on there. One of your flooring guys. He got one of his coating guys involved, and he is now a regular grout user. And they don't go chasing the jobs, they just do it all internally when they run into situations. They now say, "This is going to be a problem for our coating. We know it, we're going to go ahead and grout that ourselves beforehand." And that to me is wonderful.

Murray Heywood: One of the biggest problems with flooring - flooring's a nightmare. There are a lot of coating failures on floors and a lot of it has to do with moisture. Because where is that moisture traveling from underneath the slab? It's coming through, it's chasing the heat. It's coming up through, and anything you put over the top without addressing that - it's blistering and causing issues. That's one of the things that was top of mind for me. It wasn't my division, it wasn't my responsibility, but I always thought the flooring people needed to know about this. Because water is a big problem for them.

View the video version of this excerpt...

Want some information on Alchemy-Spetec products?