32 year old vinyl tile glue on concrete

[Rick Huelsbeck]

Anyone tell me how to get that stuff up?

[Nancy Laird]

Heat gun and lots of time!!! And a good sturdy scraper! DAMHIKT!!!!

Nancy

[Justin James]

Five brothers, heat guns, scrapers, and $100 in pizza and beer. Took a long evening for about 400 sq ft. :) Sometimes its good to come from a large family!

If you don't have the brothers, it will probably take you longer.

[Jason Roehl]

There are also glue-removing chemicals, generally available at the borgs. You probably want an organic-vapor respirator and plenty of ventilation to do that. I think you only work on a small section at a time to keep the fumes down.

Or, you can rent powered scrapers. You probably want to have a buddy and an extra blade so that one can sharpen while the other scrapes.

[Steve knight]

heat is whats the best a propane torch with a fan tip. or a propane weed burner (G)

[Rick Huelsbeck]

Five brothers, heat guns, scrapers, and $100 in pizza and beer. Took a long evening for about 400 sq ft. :) Sometimes its good to come from a large family!

If you don't have the brothers, it will probably take you longer.


Yep, it's going to take me longer, but the pizza and beer bill will be lower :D Thanks for the input. I went and bought a heat gun and some scrapers, in testing, it's not near as messy as the chemicals that just did not do as good a job as this is doing. Now to really get to work.:(

[Randal Stevenson]

I just had to do about 3500 square foot of carpet glue this month (DON'T get me started, language banned).


The chemicals are expensive (one can did about 100 square ft, but they do make it a lot easier. Anytime the blade feels even a little dull, flip it over (like honing). On some glues (ours had three different types), water worked great (one about 200 square foot section took about an hour and a half with water).
If you bought your floor scrapers from HF, take them back and get them from the borg (borg was out initially), those break at the base REALLY quickly.

The reason I scraped, was to future proof things. It took 12 people to get the carpet up in area's, due to all the glue. So my choices were to kill myself this time, or next time. Good luck, and have little ones wear hearing protection.

[Clint Jones]

I had this same problem recently. The chemicals wont work because its been there that long. Heat will work but its time consuming. Go ahead see how long it takes to do it by hand with scrapers even with heat. I started doing it myself to save a few bucks and tried chemicals, heat, scrapers, you name it I tried. It did come up but with a lot of hard work and time and I still didnt even get a 1/4 of the job done. I assume you are trying to remove the glue to put new flooring (tile,wood,vinyl) I finally broke down and had the guys that were installing the tile do it. They charged $200 to remove the glue and flatten the floor with some kind of sealer or something. All the guys laughed at me when I told them I was on my hands and knees trying to scrape it up or use the chemicals from the borg. They used some kind of buffer looking thing with a carbide disk and it just tore through the glue quick. It took them around three hours to remove the glue and level the floor and all for 200 bucks. I would say it was money well spent

[Mark Hubler]

Most of the tile (and the glue) from this era contains ASBESTOS, take care not to break it into pieces. If the tiles are 9" square, it definately contains asbestos.

[James Stokes]

The easiest way is with a buffer and scrape away head or if you want to get real easy a shot blaster.

[Russ Filtz]

Jackhammer and concrete mixer? :D

[Dan Gill]

I was able to scrape up most of mine with a wallpaper scraper (4-inch razor blade) jammed into the end of a piece of heavy PVC pipe. There were some places I had to use a chemical that had lots and lots of carcinogen warnings on it. It wasn't an inhalation risk, if I recall, but it was a contact risk.