Blue Bear 500MR Mastic Remover For Concrete Surfaces Gallon

PROJECT:58 year old black asbestos mastic under cracked, beat up, loose asbestos tile.WHAT I USED FOR THE MASTIC REMOVAL:- Blue Bear 500MR- Concrete degreaser from Rust-Oleum- Rubber disposable gloves- Cheap squeegee you can throw away- Cheap scrub brush you can throw away- Disposable shoe covers- Kitty litter- Metal dust pan- Lots of those strong blue shop paper towels. (Not the kitchen paper towels)SHORT STORYFirst Attempt: 2 hour soak timeResult: .....Kinda worked, but not really.- Lots of water was still on the floor and my patience was wearing thin after I got the tile up, so I didn't spread the 500MR as well as I should have.- The added water from my tile removal diluted the 500MR so it wasn't close to it's full strength.Second Attempt: 12 hour soak timeResult: Mastic Gone!- After cleaning up my first attempt, I reapplied the 500MR and very evenly coated the floor.- Let it sit overnight- Some scrubbing, kitty litter, and a couple rounds of degreaser gave us a mastic free floor!LONG STORY:Background:We just bought a house from 1960 and it has asbestos tile running throughout (tested). Not a big deal as we would just be covering it up with other flooring anyway. However the popcorn ceiling in the master and the compromised tile in the laundry room would not be a simple "cover it up and forget it" type of solution. We had the popcorn ceiling professionally removed and I went to work on the tile.After watching video after video about different ways to remove this black death tar adhesive, I finally decided to give the Blue Bear 500MR the starting position. It was a little spendy, but I liked the idea that it was biodegradable and their videos made it look so darn easy.Prep:After putting on my hazmat suit, gloves, goggles, respirator, and telling my wife I loved her, just in case I didn't make it out alive, I stepped into the plastic and duct tape sealed room, armed with a spray bottle, hand tools, and the 500MR. After two hours of spraying water, tile scraping, and muffled swearing into my respirator, the tile was removed and it was time for the 500MR to step up to the plate.Performance:At this point I was so frustrated with the tile that I didn't give the 500MR a setup that would lead to it's success. The floor was still soaking wet with all the water and I was about to burn the newly purchased home to the ground. I poured a little less than half the 500MR on the floor, spread it around (sort of), and got out of my astronaut costume so I could get into the makeshift decontamination shower. We went back to our apartment, had dinner, and I returned two hours later.The mastic remover did the best it could with my sloppy set up. All the water that I left on the floor diluted the 500MR so it lost some of its strength and my spreading job was lazy at best. After using kitty litter to clean up all the water and 500MR, I gave the 500MR the second chance it deserved.I reapplied the 500MR using mostly my hand in a rubber glove to very evenly spread it over every square inch of the cleaned up floor. I then left it over night and returned the next morning to a floor that was easily broken free of it's black mastic tomb with a scrub brush and some more kitty litter. A couple rounds of degreaser and the floor is sans mastic!Conclusion: What I thought was going to be the easy part, taking off the tile, ended up being the bane of my existence. And what I thought was going to be the hardest part of the job, removing the black mastic, was made extremely easy by the Blue Bear 500MR (as soon as I actually took the time to do it correctly).Things I learned that might help you:- Don't let the 500MR get diluted with water. It doesn't work as well. Just squeegee up the water before applying. It doesn't need to be dry (and shouldn't be dry if your dealing with asbestos), just free of standing water.- Kitty litter is awesome. Worked way better for me to make a little pile of litter and squeegee the 500MR/mastic soup toward the pile instead of spreading the litter around everywhere. Kitty litter gets pasty and not easy to push around when it starts soaking everything up.- Give it time. I was nervous that the 500MR would dry out if left too long on the floor. It didn't. This has a constancy something close to olive oil so I'm sure the longer it sits the more it soaks into the concrete. This will result in very easy mastic removal, but also more time spent with the degreaser and the concrete possibly being stained. So use your judgement to get a good balance of what's important to you. We are laying new flooring over the laundry room so we didn't care if the concrete was stained.- Wear shoe covers. The shoe covers will get soaked with oil/degreaser and will not protect your shoes from getting oily and tracking it everywhere, but they WILL prevent the tread of your shoes from getting CAKED with kitty litter paste which is not fun to remove. They are also cheap, easy to take off, throw away in your mastic trash bag, and swap with each stage of the process.- You will use so many paper towels. Get the good, thick, blue shop paper towels. Normal kitchen paper towels won't work. (Sorry Bounty)I hope this helps anyone with the mastic removal process. And please don't remove/mess with anything containing asbestos unless you are confident you can do it safely, responsibly, and dispose of it according to your local Department of Environmental Quality code. It's not worth the risk. That being said... This stuff is awesome.

This product worked great!! I should have bought three gallons instead of just two. The mastic was put on very thick. i had about 143 sq ft in a bedroom to work on one bottle got the bulk of the mastic up the second got the remainder of the mastic up. i let it set for about an hour and a half before using a squeegee to take it up. i also used kitty litter to get the liquid off the ground and into a trash can

The product slowly soaked into the mastic creating a big mess. It didn't do much to remove the mastic and the cleanup is still ongoing. We also used cheap corn oil on a small test patch. I would say the Blue Bear performed about 10% better than plain old corn oil and neither did a good job. 6, 12, 24, 48 hours, .... leaving it on longer did not improve performance. My guess is not all mastic is the same so if you're determined to use this product I would recommend you get a small amount to test with. Don't just pour out an entire bottle on your floor. You may be creating a mess that will take weeks to clean up.4/26/21 - still cleaning up the blue bear + mastic mess. I can't stress enough the need to test a small patch before spreading over a large area. If it works on your small test patch consider yourself lucky. If not, stop! Do not use any more product because you'll need several free weekends and hundreds of dollars to clean up the mess.6/8/21 - so it is remarkable to me how this product works on some mastic but fails miserably on other mastic. I unfortunately was in the fail group. I can't stress enough to spot test first before using on a large area. I used it on 20% of a basement. I spent hundreds of dollars trying to clean up the mess. I eventually put down two coats of PerfectPrimer and two coats of Drylok dove gray concrete paint. This combination worked great everywhere *except* where I used the MR500 Remover. This mastic was dry and hard. I cleaned it with several products the last being a citrus cleaner that came with the primer. The PerfectPrimer had great adhesion to the mastic. The Drylok concrete paint is made to go directly on concrete but it went down easily on top of the primer. I ran a dehumidifier while priming and painting. On spots where the Blue Bear MR500 pooled up the paint remains a bit tacky. I can only guess is that it is due to oil residue despite hitting it with degreaser and cleaner many times. If it doesn't set in another month I'll try another coat of primer and paint. All I can say is that the MR500 remover is it didn't work for me. It cost me a lot of money to clean up and kept my floor from being perfect when I found something that did work on my floor. I mentioned earlier that canola oil worked about the same as the MR500, but the area where I used canola oil cleaned up easily and was covered by the primer and paint and dried to a nice finish (not tacky). To encapsulate this mastic floor, it would have been far better to skip the MR500 remover, clean, prime with PerfectPrimer then paint with Drylok concreate paint.7/18/21 - Perfectprimer + Drylok concrete paint over mastic is holding up very well. It's dry, hard, low sheen and non-slip. The area where I used the Blue Bear mastic remover is still tacky (sticky), but it seems to be curing slowly now that I put a box fan on it 24/7. I think a couple more months running the fan will cure it completely.

So after reading reviews and watching videos on this DIY mastic remover, I decided to give it a shot. After about a week I should be finishing up soon. It has taken 4 gal. to do a bedroom floor just under 200 sq. ft. Granted - the mastic was thick, and old. I had to take it off in layers. It looked like in some spots, the mastic was used to level the floor. The process is messy and demands determination and elbow grease. Use a degreaser when you're done! And even THAT was hard. Maybe hire a professional. I was ill prepared for the task. At the end of the day (or in my case - week), the product WILL remove mastic.

I wasn’t sure the BEAN-e-doo product would work on the original black mastic that was used to adhere the vinyl tiles to the concrete, but I ordered one gallon and did a small test area. I used an old broom to spread the product over the mastic and after two hours I used the broom to check on the progress and it was obvious that the mastic was no longer adhered to the concrete. I then removed all of the mastic from this room. The product works well with no chemical smell. I used less than 1/2 gallon for this 90 square foot room, so expect to get about 200 sf per gallon. See photos of the before and after of the room.