The Hot Tyre on a Garage Floor Issue
The images shown here is from a floor I viewed last week. I’d say that about 50% of our work comes from repairing floors like this one. The main cause of this problem is Hot Tyre Pick Up (HTP)
Firstly, what is HTP? It’s the term used to describe your tyres ripping the coating off the garage floor. Like the image below:
What Causes Hot Tyre Pick Up?
Your tyres are basically all rubber. When you drive them friction is created by them revolving round and round on the road a truck load of times. Although “truckload” is not a technical term. Depending on the size of the tyre during a 1 KM trip an average size tyre will rotate about 1050 times.
That is a lot of friction especially since the tyre may be moving around 100km/hr. That friction creates a lot of heat causing your tyres to get to temperatures around 90c. This causes your tyre to expand because remember grade 8 science class? Rubber expands when it gets hot, then it cools down and shrinks.
When the tyre is sitting on your floor it is putting up to 90c of heat into the coating. Then it cools down and shrinks. So if your coating is rock hard and really well applied to the concrete it is likely that the heating and cooling will eventually cause the tyre to literally rip off the coating.
Just like a cheap band-aid, that coating will look pretty and effective but in reality it will peel off really easily the minute it gets even a tiny bit of pressure on it.
