Remember the days when small 5 to 7 year old kids were part of your floor care “crew”?
You know… when you’d take your kid to a floor stripping job and get her (or him) to sit on your floor machine to “weigh-down” the machine?
It was more fun for the kids than anything else.
I mean at that age, who wouldn’t want to have a “joy-ride” on a floor machine…
Getting swung from side to side… getting pushed back and forth… all while doing your best to hold on and not fall off.
PHOTO CREDIT: Raphaël Labbé
Okay, so that was waaay back in the day.
Not something that you’d encourage today…
And not something that you would even want to try with the potential risk of safety and injury to the child.
But that extra 35 to 45 pounds provided by the kid, was a huge benefit to the operator.
And here’s why…
That extra weight created more downward pressure and extra “bite” on the rotating stripping pad to help strip those layers of heavy, old wax from floors.
And that’s what inspired Tony Lelkes (Centaur’s founder) to come up with a smart innovation 20+ years ago:
The 40 lb Horseshoe Weight.
Here are some Pro-Tips showing what these 40 lb weights can do for you if you’re a custodian, floor technician, a commercial cleaner, or if you provide stone floor restoration services.
- How To Clean Floors 25% FASTER
When stripping, polishing or scrubbing floors using a floor machine – adding a single 40 lb weight will cut down the time it takes you to complete your job by 25%.
That means a job that would take you 4 hours to do, would get done in 3 hours instead.
And here’s why:
The floor machine (example the Centaur Rabbit-1 or Rabbit-3) weighs about 70 to 80 pounds.
Putting an extra 40 lb weight on a machine increases the net effective weight of the machine and provides more downward pressure as you clean floors.
That’s going to give your machine extra “muscle”, and this means that you’ll require fewer side-to-side passes of the machine to get the same results… even if you have layers of stubborn wax to strip from those floors.
That’s how you save time and cut down the time it takes to get the job done by 25%.
- How To Clean Floors 50% FASTER (i.e. in HALF The Time)
When you add a second 40 lb weight on Centaur Rabbit-1 or Rabbit-3 (giving you a total extra 80 lbs of “muscle” on your machine) — you cut down the time it takes to complete a wax stripping job in HALF.
So, a job that would normally take 4 hours to complete, can be completed in just 2 hours.
Both the Rabbit-1 and the Rabbit-3 are engineered to easily handle 80 lbs of extra weight (or two 40 lb Horseshoe weights) without putting a strain on the motor.
- How To Use Weights To Polish Floors Without a High-Speed Floor Burnisher
To polish floors and bring floors to a perfect shine, use a 40 lb weight on a Rabbit-3 operating at high speed (300 RPM) with a natural blend cleaning pad (also known as hog’s hair pad).
This creates heat under the pad (due to friction of the pad) and this heat will help bring the shine to your floor finish through the action of thermal buffing.
There’s no need to get a separate burnishing machine to get the same result.
- Use Weights For Stone Polishing & Finishing
Weights are also an integral tool for hard stone polishing and rejuvenation.
Jobs such as marble / granite refinishing and polishing would take so much longer without the use of extra weights.
The video below shows an example of an operator working on a stone floor in a Hindu Temple.
Notice the Centaur Stonechat carrying 10 (ten) of the 40 lb Horseshoe weights for an extra 400 lbs of “muscle” to get that perfect, precision finished floor.
Here’s something else you should know:
The Horseshoe weights are specially designed and engineered to provide the best floor finishing results.
Here’s how:
- The “horseshoe design” allows the weight to sit around the motor head of the machine providing an equal, uniform, and consistent downward pressure to the floor pad or diamonds.
- When you stack weights on top of each other, you want the weights aligned on top of each other so that they provide uniform, consistent downward pressure. That’s why Centaur weights come with “pins” on them. These pins keep stacked weights aligned and “lock them” in place preventing the weights from slipping off each other. So, the whole stack of weights stays in place while using the machine.
Although you might consider using Centaur weights on other floor machines (not just Centaur machines), you should check to see whether the construction and technical specifications of your machine will support using weights safely.
You see, weights create more friction between the machine cleaning pad / tool, and the floor.
This means that there is more electric load on the motor and more electric current is drawn from the power circuit.
If your machine can’t handle this load, you could “burn out” your motor on your machine or trip the circuit breakers in the building you are working in.
(This could mean repeatedly having to go up and down flights of stairs to the electric panel to reset the circuit breakers. This can be both frustrating and a major inconvenience).
If your machine “burns-out” then that could mean a costly repair, weeks of downtime, or replacing your machine altogether.
So, only use weights where the manufacturer of that machine has demonstrated that their machine will accommodate extra weights.
_______
NOTE: Centaur machines are purpose-built to carry Centaur’s 40 lb Horseshoe Weights.
The Centaur Stonechat in particular has an on-board amperage meter to show how much electric current you’re drawing from a standard 15 AMP circuit – so you know when you can stack on more weights or remove extra weights during a job.