Save Money, Save Time: 2 Innovative Ways to Use HyperTone™ Stains on Sport Floors

Tinting Finish

For residential, commercial, and sport floors, contractors traditionally stain the properly prepared bare hardwood, followed by (a) coat(s) of sealer, and then finish.  This is still the predominant method to change the color of hardwood flooring.

Some contractors, however, have begun sealing the floor first, then applying coats of tinted finish. The benefits are numerous:

1. On the front side, this process is faster and provides greater control over the depth and consistency of color. 
2. On the back side (when it’s time to re-sand the floor), there’s less work, because contractors don’t have to take off as much of the top layer of flooring to remove the stain and/or worry about the stain seeping further into the tongue and grooves. 
3. Plus, because less sanding is required, more sandings are possible, saving customers significant costs over the life of the floor.

HyperTone Stains is roughly 10% of the cost. When you add the cost of finish plus stain, there’s a whopping 23% savings!

But the advantages don’t stop there.

Spurred by all the buzz, we worked with a sport contractor to quantify the benefits in terms of their savings.  We kept things simple—1 gallon of finish with comparable paint and stain levels—and the results showed that HyperTone Stains is roughly 10% of the cost. When you add the cost of finish plus stain, there’s a whopping 23% savings!

Paint Versus Tinting Finish

Although stain was applied to plenty of sport floors in the past, use skyrocketed once the MFMA recognized the practice at their convention in 2018. While paint for game lines and logos continues to be the dominant process, we have encountered sport floor contractors using a heavier load of HyperTone Stains to tint finish instead—again, with various upsides:

1. Using the same product for lines/logos as the finish could reduce chipping that is often seen with paint (time will tell if this holds true, but so far, so good).
2. Significant reduction in the cost of paint—both in the number of gallons purchased and the paint gallons that go unused due to shelf life. 
3. When the paint lines or painted logos are abraded (to prepare to accept finish coats), the heavily pigmented colored dust from the paint can contaminate adjacent colors (or flooring), which can be tough to prevent or remove (for example, a bright red paint logo contaminating the adjacent white).  When HyperTone Stain is encapsulated into the finish and used like a paint, the pigment load is reduced significantly, and the issue is virtually eliminated. 
   

We again calculated the cost savings when working with a contractor to tint the finish with heavier pigment loads, so the product could be tested in lieu of game line/logo paint.  When comparing 1 gallon of stain plus finish with comparable game line paint, tinting finish was roughly half the price! While this may or may not be a savings large enough to make the switch for any one job, just like tinting the finish above, the contractor sees tremendous cost advantages over the entire season. 

When comparing 1 gallon of stain plus finish with comparable game line paint, tinting finish was roughly half the price!

Ultimately, the jobsite benefits and cost savings have more contractors rethinking processes to improve their offering. If this is something that might interest you, let us know by clicking here to fill out the online form. We’ll be more than happy to work with you to see if these or other innovative HyperTone Stain application methods could enhance the value of your operation, as well as calculate your potential savings.

To learn more about HyperTone Stains, please click here.