Any tricks/tips for removing lino tiles that are glued onto a concrete floor, other than a hot air gun and putty knife (and potentially lots of swearing)?
Tiles are 12"x12", room is probably about 14'x25'. Based on some which are lifting in other parts of the building, I'm hoping that the glue's not particularly strong, but sod's law and all that...
cheers
Jules
As usual, an angle grinder?
Or a Dremel.
All the methods I know involve considerable time and raw sore hands and aching back with a scraper.
So my advice is to not bother and cover them with the new stuff. These tiles are usually not thick and so removal is superfluous. Patching any holes can be a simple matter of the use of car body filler.
Garden spade.
On Friday 04 January 2013 23:30 Jules Richardson wrote in uk.d-i-y:
Flat-ish[1] sharp gardening spade, slid under with speed. Usually IME pops them off clean one by one.
[1] Some spades are quite flat, some are rounded.In message , Tim Watts writes
Isn't there a commercially available tool for removing mortar splashes from sub floors?
Google *floor scraper tool* gets lots of hits.
Are they genuine linoleum?
I ask because I was recently involved with floor tiles which had been cracking up. They proved to be asbestos-filled thermoplastic from the
1960s. Which were removed by a professional and properly disposed of. Even though at the very bottom of the asbestos danger list, rules apply.Not certain what he used - but I would consider trying an SDS chisel, maybe after sharpening up a bit.
I did use an SDS special bit for exactly this purpose when dealing with daughter 2's kitchen floor. I note that Toolstation have one in their catalogue; it's called a "Tile Lifter" - suprise ;-)
I was working in a B&Q store once (after it closed) and some guys were removing floor tiles prior to replacement.
One had a gadget like a gas powered weed gun & the other one had a long handled floor scraper. They had obviously done it many times before, the rate they got them off was incredible.
On Saturday 05 January 2013 09:59 Tim Lamb wrote in uk.d-i-y:
No - a spade works much better - I have tried both.
How good the bond is will eb the deciding factor. The floor here has vynly tiles (are yours really lino?) but are in reasonable condition witha few bits missing here and there. They are only a few mm thick so I suspect that the carpet underlay will take that without problem. I'm not keen on lifting 'em partly because of Sods Law, 75% will come off easy, the other 25% will take the concrete subfloor with 'em... Also there is something black underneath an my suspicion is of something bitumen based, best to keep that covered.
If they are looseish the sharp flat spade is the way to go rather than hands and knees and handheld tools.
... and thanks for all the relies, all. I shall be taking a spade in with me to try tomorrow, and also a nice flat metal snow shovel that I've got kicking around. It occurred to be that there's also a long-handled tool at work that we use for chipping ice off things; it looks very like the floor scraper tool that has been mentioned, so I wonder if that's what it originally was... :-)
cheers
Jules
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