How Vinyl Floors Are Made
Vinyl is everywhere, and not just your 1970s album collection. Vinyl is used to package our food and drink, trim out every car built, protect millions of professional and weekend athletes, and accomplish countless other everyday and specialty tasks. All of these items are made with the same basic elements of a vinyl floor.
Rotogravure
The rotogravure printing process is the most commonly used method for making residential sheet vinyl floors, offering unlimited possibilities in pattern and design.
The rotogravure process involves a print cylinder that spins around while the vinyl's core layer (called the gel coat) passes underneath.
The cylinder systematically prints various colored ink dyes to create the pattern. Texture and embossing are added to give the vinyl the realistic, natural looks that are prevalent in today's vinyl floors.
After the print dyes are set, a clear wearlayer is applied to the surface. The appearance retention of a rotogravure vinyl floor is dependent on the durability of the clear wearlayer.
Wearlayer
The wearlayer is absolutely critical to the performance of your vinyl floor. The thickness of the wearlayer varies with each vinyl product collection, or series, and is generally measured in mils. The thickness of a mil is about the same as a page in your telephone book.
Generally, the more expensive vinyl floors have thicker wearlayers.
Your expectations for how long your vinyl floor will look new and attractive are based on the wearlayer's performance.
These performance characteristics of a wearlayer can be divided into several areas.
The easy to clean characteristic relates to how tough it is to remove soiling and other marks from the floor's surface. When a floor begins to look old and drab it is usually caused by hundreds of fine hairline scratches in the wearlayer. These fine scratches come from dirt, grit and sand laying on the wearlayer's surface.
However, the new generation of vinyl floors has all the ingredients to resist showing wear and staining, plus all the beauty, style and value to certainly put vinyl in the running as a potential flooring for your home and home life.
