Fixing the slab before anything goes over it
Cracks, divots, pitting and spalled edges cut out and rebuilt properly. Part of every coating we lay, and available on its own.
Residential work
Which cracks matter and which do not
Every floor we coat gets its concrete repaired first, because a coating laid over a crack simply prints the shape of that crack through the finish and the crack opens again anyway. We also do the repair work on its own, for people who are not ready to coat or whose slab needs attention for its own sake.
Most cracks in a residential slab are shrinkage cracks. Concrete gives off water as it cures and shrinks slightly while doing it, and the slab relieves that stress by cracking somewhere. Those cracks appeared in the first year, they have not moved since, and they are a cosmetic and sealing problem rather than a structural one. They repair permanently.
A smaller number are movement cracks, where the ground under one part of the slab has settled or heaved and the two sides are no longer at the same height. Run a hand across it. If you can feel a step between the two sides, or if the crack has visibly widened over the years, it is active.
Active cracks can be repaired and they will move again, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a warranty they cannot honour. What we can do is repair it properly, tell you honestly what it is, and give you a realistic view of what will happen.
We show up, finish on time, and get it right. No hidden fees, no surprises.
Jimmy and Justyn, Cobra Epoxy
How a repair is actually done
A crack does not get filled by squeezing something into the gap. That gives you a line of filler sitting in a V that pops out the first time anything loads it.
The crack gets opened up with a saw or a grinder into a channel with clean square sides, so there is a real surface for the repair material to bond to and enough volume for it to have strength. Dust and loose material get vacuumed out.
Then it is filled with a semi rigid polyurea or an epoxy mortar depending on what the crack is doing, slightly proud, and ground back flush once it has cured. Done that way the repair is stronger than the concrete around it.
Spalled areas and pitting get the same treatment at a larger scale: cut back to sound concrete, filled, levelled, ground flush.
What the price covers
Every one of these, every time
Every one of these is in the price as standard. The only thing that moves a number is what we find in the concrete, and you hear that at the walkthrough.
What happens across the two days
Day one starts with clearing and masking, then grinding. The diamond grinders run with dust extraction attached, which keeps the mess to something reasonable and keeps silica dust out of the air. We work the slab until it is uniformly open and clean rather than until it looks clean.
Still on day one, the repairs go in. Cracks and divots are filled, pitting is levelled and the joints get treated. Then the base coat goes down and the flake is broadcast into it by hand, wall to wall, until the surface is saturated.
Day two is the scrape back, the vacuum and the topcoat. Scraping is what converts a rough chip surface into an even one, and skipping it is why some flake floors feel like sandpaper. Then the polyaspartic seals everything in.
You can normally walk on it that evening. Furniture and light use come back the next day, and a garage is ready for a car after about three days once the system has hardened enough to take hot tyres without marking.
Why this is the stage that decides the floor
Customers keep mentioning prep work in our reviews, and repair is the visible half of it. Grinding is invisible in the finished floor. Repair is not, because a badly repaired crack shows through a coating within a year and a well repaired one never appears at all.
It is also where the honesty happens. A coating will hide a crack for a season. We would rather cut it out, tell you what we found, and put the cost of that in the number you were given at the walkthrough than let it disappear and reappear later.
A floor that was ground properly and repaired before the first coat will still look right in ten years.
Cobra Epoxy and Flake Coatings, Boyertown PARepair now, coat later
Plenty of people are not ready to coat a floor and do want the slab dealt with, usually because a crack is spreading or an edge is breaking up and they can see where it is going.
That is a sensible order. Repairing concrete while the damage is contained is far cheaper than waiting until a spall has undermined a larger area, and the repair does not go to waste when you do coat later.
The one thing worth knowing is that a repair on a bare slab is visible. It will be a slightly different colour to the concrete around it, because it is a different material. Under a coating that disappears completely. On a bare floor it will look like what it is, which is a repair.
On the map
Where we do this work
Boyertown sits where Berks, Montgomery, Chester and Lehigh all come within reach, which is the only reason a company this size covers four counties properly. The service areas page has the full list.
At the far edge of the radius we will be straight with you about whether a small job stands up as its own trip. Asking costs nothing.
Questions
Before you book
Straight answers to the questions that come up before anybody commits to anything.
My concrete is in rough shape. Is it too far gone?
Almost certainly not. Surface damage, pitting, spalling and cracking are all normal repair work and they get sorted as part of the job. The one case where we will tell you to stop is structural movement, a slab that has heaved or dropped at a corner, because a coating sits on top of that problem rather than solving it.
Can you test before I commit to anything?
Yes, and on any basement or older slab we do it as part of the walkthrough rather than after you have agreed to the work. It is the one measurement that can change the answer from yes to not yet, so taking it early is in everybody interest.
My floor was coated before and it failed. Can you fix it?
Yes, and it is a good share of what we do. The old system comes off completely, because coating over somebody else failed film means inheriting their bond. Then the damage underneath gets repaired and the floor is rebuilt properly. It is more work than a bare slab, so an honest price is higher rather than lower.
Can you give me a price over the phone?
Not an honest one. Square footage is only half of it, and the other half is what condition the concrete is in, which nobody can tell you down a phone line. The walkthrough is free, it takes half an hour, and you get a real number at the end of it rather than a range that moves once we arrive.
Is the house going to be covered in concrete dust?
No. Every grinder runs with extraction on it, and we mask off doorways and openings before anything starts. Some fine dust is unavoidable on any grinding job, but the difference between a machine with extraction and one without is the difference between a tidy site and a week of cleaning.
What is not covered?
Damage rather than failure. If somebody drops an engine block on it, drags a steel skid across it, or attacks it with something acidic, that is not a system failure and we will say so. Exterior work is warranted separately because sun, ice and ground movement are conditions an interior floor never sees. It is all written down rather than left vague.
Is the work subcontracted out?
No. Cobra is deliberately small, which means Justyn is on the floor and Jimmy has seen every job that goes out. We could take on more crews and more trucks tomorrow, but the standard is only reliable while we are standing next to it, and the reviews are the thing we would lose first.
What is the current lead time?
It moves with the season, so the answer you get on the phone is the real one rather than a standard line. Winter is generally the easiest time to get an interior floor booked because the outdoor calendar is closed. Spring and early summer are the tightest, mostly because of deck and patio work.
Book a walkthrough
Get pricing on your concrete crack repair
Fill this in and Jimmy comes back to you within a business day to arrange a look. He measures up, checks what the concrete is doing, and you get a real number rather than a range that moves later.
Boyertown based, working a fifty mile radius. The service areas page lists every town we have written up.
Call (484) 942-3219 and you will get Jimmy rather than a switchboard. Email jfaust@cobraepoxy.com works just as well, and so does the form on the contact page.
Tell us about the floor
This goes straight to Jimmy. He will call inside a business day and arrange a time.
More of what we coat: garage floor refinishing, garage epoxy flooring, basement epoxy flooring. See finished floors in the gallery, read about Jimmy and Justyn, or check the towns we cover. Ready to talk? Book a walkthrough.