SandFree™ FAQs	I Need a Wood Man!

Buddakan 3rd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, PA. There are a lot of ways to look at our experience at Buddakan - it was either our greatest learning experience or our biggest failure.  Maybe both. A note on history - a lot of the inspiration for Buddakan came from the Blue Bar in the Delano Hotel in South Beach, Fla.  If you go there, you'll see similar booths, a similar community table, and the exact same wood - jatoba (Brazilian cherry).  Stephen Starr, the owner and driving force of SRO (Starr Restaurant Organization) loved the wood and installed it in Buddakan.

It's hard to imagine how successful this restaurant is.  It serves meals 14 hours a day, and is open 2 more hours closing, and 2 more hours opening.  That's 18 hours a day, leaving only 6 hours a day to do the work.  Although we didn't know it at the time, that wasn't our main obstacle.  Our main obstacle was - we didn't know exactly what  previously had been applied to the floor. We were told they were using oil, and from what  found in the supply room,  they were.  From what we were told, when the restaurant was opened, the wood floors looked absolutely wonderful, and continued to look great  for another couple of years.  At that point there was a change in maintenance, and a greasy buildup occurred.  When we were first contacted, the floor was constantly sticky, despite 2 hours every morning of buffing by their maintenance people.  They had been oiling the wood floor every day for years and there was a severe buildup. 

Our goal with Buddakan was to:

We did a test area in the back hall - which was the greasiest and dirtiest of all of the areas.  Our "Wood Zamboni" had finally arrived and we were thrilled to see how great the SandFree™ process worked in that hall.  In a matter of minutes, the Zamboni removed all of the grease and dirt.  We applied the super-glue, and then the matte-finish urethane.  After 2 weeks we checked the floor to see if it had performed perfectly.  It had and we received the ok to continue.

Next we did the 1500 foot bar area.  Our start was delayed by Patrick Swayze, who happened to be in Philadelphia that night and reserved the community table for his entourage.    About 2 in the morning they left, although not before we made sure he knew that he was witnessing wood history with the second running of the "Wood Zamboni".  I think the women in the restaurant were more impressed with Patrick than he was with our Zamboni.  We weren't that impressed with Patrick  either because we couldn't start until 3:00 AM.  Regardless, by 7:30, the 1500 feet were done.  By noon, less than 5 hours after we finished, lunch was being served.  The only issue with the bar area was that there were some high heel dents in the urethane.  This was attributable to the fact that the urethane is 90% cured in 24 hours, but less than 20% cured in 6 hours.  The urethane was dry to the touch after 30 minutes, but had not hardened through to the wood.  Even so, the performance was still great, and it looked a lot better than the floor we started with..

There were 3 areas left to do - a seating area by the window, the community table area, and the seating areas by the kitchen.  Each night we did another area and the floor appeared to be performing great. We had accomplished our goals - the wood was beautiful, the maintenance was going to be greatly reduced, all of the work was done in after hours, they hadn't missed serving a drink, and there was no dust, no odor, and no downtime.   But "all was not well in Muddville."  Blisters began to appear only in the seating area near the window.  And, they got worse.  It's hard to believe the floor on the right was beginning to fail.. We came back, 2 nights later, and began testing the floor to see what had happened.  To our dismay, the urethane was coming up in sheets, everywhere, in that 1 seating area only.  There was no adhesion between the urethane, the super glue, and the wood.  It took a lot of testing, but what we determined was that at some point the maintenance group had used an acrylic-based, wax polish in that one area only.  The wax, although not present on the very surface of the wood, remained in the crevices.  When the bonding agent went to penetrate all of the little holes, it could not bond to the wax.  That's what led to the failure and to the addition of another "node" in our "wood refinishing decision tree."  If there is wax present, after Phase III, we change the products for Phase IV and Phase V. The irony of the situation was that we had completed the hard part - we completely prepared that floor to receive a finish without sanding, using our chemicals, in less than an hour!  We could easily have applied oil at that time, or wax,  but our goal of reduced maintenance would have been lost with either finish.  The only way to achieve the reduced maintenance savings was to use urethane.

The wax caused the whole floor to be sanded.  Moving trucks were brought in and all of the furniture  was loaded into those vans.  The restaurant was closed for the Memorial Day Weekend  (I don't even want to think of what that cost.).  Without the SandFree™ process the floor would have had to be sanded to remove the layer of residue, but we were so close to a 100% success, and yet it became a 100% failure.

The old-school wood guys said Brazilian cherry can't accept urethane.  This is absolutely false.  After Buddakan, we SandFree™ 'd two other restaurants with Jatoba floors.  We used urethane and they've performed exactly as we hoped.  The maintenance is minimized, and the floors look great.

It's not often when everyone loses, and from that aspect ,Buddakan ended up sanding the floor just as  they thought they would.  Even though Buddakan is hundreds of thousands of refinished feet ago, we still feel badly that it didn't work out as we had hoped.