Bitumen help needed

[richard.maddock]

Hi, 6 months ago I had vinyl laid on bitumen. Which is now bleeding through
How will this develop? Will the vinyl just get darker and darker, will the bitumen become tacky or liquid
Is the " easy" cure just to lay a protective membrane and add another layer of vinyl, or rip up the vinyl, or can the darkening be washed off

 

[Incognito]

That was a real bad idea and I'd not even try to salvage the flooring. Most vinyl is incompatible with tar/cutback adhesive/bitumen and will essentially melt in contact with it.

It's always preferred to remove the tar mechanically------scraping and shotblasting it off the surface. Many companies will use chemicals to strip it away. Flooring manufacturers dont approve and will not warranty from my experience.

What we've done (millions of square feet) is cover over the cutback with floor patch after "Scrape-Away" the heavy trowel ridges. It's critical to apply a thick enough coat-----no less than 1/8" in my opinion to keep the chemicals apart. I can't think of any issues we had when doing these procedures and we'd be doing this in schools, hospitals and office space that could (or would) not shut down long enough for a shotblast system which shuts down the entire area for quite a bit longer than just skimcoat.

In many instances the bitumen would be chemically stripped by others before we arrived. In those cases we still applied a heavy coat of patch to prevent any residual chemicals from that procedure to impact our installation. This situation was something we insisted on because the manufacturer of the floor patch, glue and floorcovering refused to warranty unless the cutback was REMOVED. So if they didn't want to at least encapsulate then we would pass on the job and recommend they use another installation company.