Vinyl flake
Thrown up, never dropped, until the coat will not take another chip
A flake floor is not a floor with flakes on it. The chips are broadcast into a wet base coat until the base will physically hold no more (to refusal, in the trade), and what you are then standing on is a surface made almost entirely of vinyl, held together by the resin it landed in.
That is the difference between a flake floor and a decorated one, and it is visible from across the room once you know to look.
How it is actually thrown
The chips are thrown upward and allowed to fall, not scattered down at the floor. A chip dropped from the hand lands on edge and stands up in the resin; a chip that has been up in the air and come down flat lands flat and random. Stood-up chips are what you feel underfoot later, and what the grinder has to take off the next morning.
It is done working backwards out of the bay, and it is the one part of the job where more people is genuinely better. Two throwers keep a wet edge across a double garage. One thrower does not, and the join shows.
The morning after
The floor is scraped and vacuumed before anything else happens, which takes the loose chips and the standing ones off and leaves a flat bed. Then it is sealed twice: the first polyaspartic coat wets the chips out and disappears into them, the second builds the gloss.
One seal coat over flake is the most common shortcut on this system. It looks finished on the day and it is not; the chip edges are still proud, so the floor holds dirt and feels like fine sandpaper.
Choosing a blend
Twelve stock blends, and we will mix one to your colours if none of them fit. What we will argue about is contrast. A high-contrast blend hides everything: tyre marks, dropped oil, and the repair you will need in year six. A near-monotone blend looks better in a photograph and shows every one of them.
For a working garage or a warehouse, take the busy blend. For a showroom floor nobody walks on in boots, the quiet one is fine.
How to tellLook at a flake floor from a low angle across the light. Broadcast to refusal, there is no base colour visible anywhere, including in the corners. Broadcast to a budget, the corners and the edges show the colour underneath, because that is where the thrower ran out.
What to ask
Ask how many kilos of flake are on the quote, and how many seal coats. Half a kilo a square metre and two coats is a flake floor; a quarter kilo and one coat is a coloured floor with some chips in it, and it will not look the same in a year.