“While we were doing that, we were using other materials that were available on the market. Some of them were pretty good, but we weren’t super happy with the performance of a lot of them.” Mike’s university education in science, predominately chemistry, helped him in researching and developing his own line of concrete repair products. “At the time I was going to university studying science, focusing on chemistry,” he recalls. “In 2008 I came up with the idea of making our own materials to use, not really knowing what that would entail but investigating the chemistries of it and finding ways to improve on the existing technology by taking all the benefits of what we’d used and eliminating all the negatives. For three to four years we were making products, testing them, using them for our own purposes.” “That eventually led into the creation of Terrafuse Inc. We realized we had some good materials, and they were working very well for the industry and what we were doing. We started Terrafuse to begin offering and selling these products to other contractors.” Finding the right mix and ratio of ingredients is critical to developing a good product, Mike explains, but it can be a challenge. Factors to consider include thickness of coverage, cure time, temperature restrictions, and other variables. When you make a change to improve one aspect of performance, you can often end up compromising other aspects – so research and development can be a tricky balancing act. “A lot of materials for concrete restoration have a narrow range of benefits and uses, while having a large range of restrictions,” Mike says. “What we aimed to accomplish was to make one material that could encapsulate all those features and benefits and eliminate a lot of the restrictions. That was our mission when we created our flagship material, TF Structural. It’s a concrete restoration mortar that can go as thin as you want, as thick as you want, you can install it below zero degrees. It cures extremely rapidly. You can have traffic on it in as little as 20 minutes. It does essentially everything that all the products out there can do in one bag.” MARCH 2024
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