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Concrete Repair Tips for Beginners

Do you need concrete repair tips for steps or porches? Today’s tutorial is great for beginners who want a one-day fix.

Plus, I’ll share all the tools and materials that make this project much easier.

Let’s dive in!

Concrete Repair Supplies

Tools make all the difference for concrete repairs. Below is a list of the supplies you’ll need:

Hammer drills are needed to drill through concrete. If you can only buy one, get an SDS drill.

SDS Drill for Concrete Repair

They’re awesome and will speed up your project.

The first step to repairing broken concrete is prep.

How to Prep Broken Concrete

Wire brush and shop vac all the old concrete. This will help you inspect the concrete for any additional cracks or imperfections.

How to Wire Brush Concrete

Remove any paint or debris that could interfere with the bonding of new material to old material.

Then apply concrete bonding adhesive to all bare concrete. This is a crucial step and without it, your concrete patch could fail.

PRO TIP: shake the bottle of concrete bonding adhesive for 30 to 60 seconds; this will mix the components and ensure the adhesive is homogenous.

How to Drill Tapcons into Concrete

Hammer drills are needed to drill through concrete. I highly recommend SDS drills if you can afford one; they’re fast and can drill through very hard concrete.

Also, you’ll need Tapcons and the accompanying drill bit. Fortunately, most Tapcon screws come with a carbide drill bit.

Drill several holes into the concrete where the patch will go. Then add the Tapcons, they’ll serve as anchors for the new cement.

How to Add Tapcons

Shop-vac the area again to remove any dust from the concrete bonding adhesive.

The next step is to mix up quick-setting cement.

How to use Quick-Setting Cement

As far as concrete repair tips go, this one is one of the best. Use Quikrete quick-setting cement to speed up your project.

How to Use Quick-Setting Cement

Quick-setting cement will harden in 10-20 minutes; this also allows the cement to be shaped in one day.

I recommend mixing 1 part water to 5-1/2 parts cement, per the Quikrete instructions. A margin trowel and a small bucket make this easy.

Only mix a batch of cement that can be used in 10 minutes. Then feed that cement into the concrete with the margin trowel and hawk.

An edger and sponge can be used to shape the cement.

This short video tutorial shows start to finish all the concrete repair tips mentioned.

What’s Next

Here’s another tutorial that’ll share how to do a cement step repair project.

Hopefully, the tips in these tutorials make your concrete project look new.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to help.

Hope you have an awesome day!

Cheers,

Jeff




Concrete Repair