Stone Care Questions

[john martinez]

I am looking to get into stone floor care (cleaning polishing and sealing) and have pretty good experience with carpet cleaning with extractors, carpet cleaning with cotton bonnets and tile and grout cleaning with a CRB called the MultiWash made by Powrflite that scrubs the hard floors clean after they've been pre sprayed and does a pretty good job of PU the dirty solution as it goes. Then of course I rinse the floors and dry them with microfiber mops so to make a short story long I definitely enjoy cleaning floors and have a good handle on carpet and ceramic tile so in an effort to start doing stone floors I purchased 3 DIP pads from Bonastre (Red then Yellow then Green) but I haven't used them yet BC I lack the confidence and don't want to own someone's new stone flooring. I also want to buy weights for my 175 20" Nobles Tennant floor machine to assist in the polishing process & although it's not made for weights I did compare the units specs and it has the same 1.5 HP motor as the HD machines but I don't know if it has the same torque or triple planetary transmission whatever that means. BC the top of the machine is not made to accept weights I stopped into an older floor care business in South Phoenix and he offered me a weighted pad driver that fits my machine that supposedly 3M stopped making 20 years ago and this thing is a concrete monster! so for $400 I could have plenty of weight. Also the bottom of the weighted pad driver has several round pieces Velcro to accept diamond pucks or even my DIP pads. He also said I can polish without weights using I think steel wool and oxalic acid. Would you recommend I add this discontinued weighted pad driver from 3M for stone floor care and do I use weights only when using diamond pucks or with DIP pads too like my Bonastre? And can I do stone floor polishing with just the 175 or do I need to rent a burnisher for certain work? What pads if you recommend a high speed burnisher? TIA! Sorry for the long message BTW just really want to learn what gets good results and I am also looking for a good stone care class