Hello everyone. My folks have a set of poured in place cement steps that are 45 years old and the cement is breaking down due to the winters and salt use. We live on Long Island.
Any way I’m thinking about breaking the worse parts of the steps off and reforming the steps and pouring new cement over the old. Has any one had to deal with this before? Any ideas. I really don’t want to tear it all the way down and start from new. Look forward to hearing your ideas. Thanks for your ideas.
Replies
Cold joints are always iffy. I would drill and dowel with epoxy, and use a concrete bonding agent. Pourstone on the smaller stuff. Still no guarantee it won't separate over time. The best way is...oh yeah, you don't want to hear that!
What Huck said.
Heck If I know....
Hack, Huck & Heck Inc.
Welcome, see this is your first post.
Had always had good success with bonding to clean (even not so clean) broken concrete by wire brushing on a coat of cement grout (just cement, no sand, about the consistency of white glue, cup wire brush on drill works good for surfaces). Pour new concrete onto grout bonded surface within an hour. Learned the technique from grouting rock bolts into missile silo walls.
You should look into the Abatron products. They have a line of concrete repair products specifically for this type of thing.
http://www.abatron.com
The Abatron products in general are good, though I haven't used their concrete stuff. But stay away from any real wire brushes on concrete, as they leave tiny pieces of metal that rust. Nylon or natural fiber if you can.
I'm not sure how bad your steps are but here's what I did for mine. I had some large pock marks on the top and the sides of my steps. Plus the edges of the steps were in bad shape.
First, I cleaned the holes and crevices good. Then I used some Quikrete vinyl patching cement to fill the larger holes and reformed the edges of the steps. Make sure the cement is on the stiff side so it's easy to form.
I let it dry for a week and then bought some Top-N-Bond. Used this to skimcoat the top and the sides. Looks great. Has held up for 2 winters so far without any signs of wear.
GT,
Thanks for the advise I think these steps are a little to far gone for this type of repair because the remaining cement is really erroaded. Again thank you Dave
There were two times that it worked great to do a "treated wood overlay". The basic steps were sound and the extra thickness didn't hurt anything. I didn't have a camera at the time or I'd post it, but in the end it just looked like wood steps.