Special Pre-colouring

NATURAL BEAUTY TAKES CENTRE STAGE

THE VARIOUS BENEFITS OF PRE-COLOURING A WOODEN FLOOR

Dr. Alexander Wörndle and Rossitza Dimitrova (Heubach Group)

“Eco-compatible pigment preparations for sustainable wood coatings”

When talking about colours, you almost invariably end up with the German Heubach Group. Heubach has been a household name in the creation of colours for more than 200 years and today is a global industry leader in the field of organic, inorganic, and anti-corrosive pigments, pigment preparations, dyes and specialty materials, with a specific emphasis on sustainability. Beginning of January of this year, Heubach announced the acquisition of Clariant’s Global Colorants Business. The combination of Heubach and Clariant Pigments creates a global colorants powerhouse committed to the highest standards in manufacturing, quality and service.

What are the consequences of this acquisition? And what can we expect specifically for the market of (wooden) floors? These are two of the questions we asked Dr. Alexander Wörndle and Rossitza Dimitrova, respectively Segment Head Global Key Accounts Coatings, Global Technical Marketing Coatings, and Head of Technical Marketing, Middle East and Africa for Heubach. Our interlocutors are based in Germany and South Africa.

“The acquisition of Clariant’s Global Colorants Business was realised by the Heubach Group and SK Capital Partners, a private investment firm focused on the specialty materials, chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors”, says Dr. Wörndle. “The newly combined Heubach Group is a technological and quality leader and operates globally from 19 manufacturing facilities across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, employing approximately 3,000 people and with our headquarters in Vienna, Austria.”

New colorants for wood coatings

The new Heubach Group recently developed new colorants and solutions for wood, thus also targeting the sector of wooden and resilient floors. Rossitza Dimitrova explains: "Sustainability and innovations are our focus, when developing products or solutions for specific applications. Our colourants are non flammable, non-toxic, and do not contain lead-chromate nor APEO, complying to the latest European regulations and suitable for the modern low VOC coatings for wood.”

“Our solutions for wood colouration are based on safer colourants with improved compatibility to a wide range of customer products for wood. Customers can chose between “ready-to-use” or “tailor-made” systems. Along with providing the right colourants for the right application, we are offering to our customers technical support to create new colour formulations, latest trending shades and marketing materials, such as wood colour catalogues. In that way, customers can implement total solutions for wood and wooden flooring, with excellent, durable performance, improved compatibility and brillance, both indoors and outdoors. In our range, we provide colorants suitable for solvent-based and water-based applications, as well as UV-cured coatings, and we can support our customers to meet the requirements of the market.”

“It is important to show our customers what can be achieved, especially when it comes to trend colours”, adds Dr. Wörndle. “One of the first questions customers ask is about colours: which colours do you offer, what can I do with these or can I create whatever colour I wish? To help them, Rossitza has specifically worked on a colour book for wood to demonstrate what can be done with our various product offers for wood coatings – from timeless shades to the latest trend colors. We partly draw from knowledge generated in other areas, like our recently published Color Trends 2022 for Decorative Paints or the 2025 Automotive Styling Shades Trend Book, which we launched in 2021".

“One of our product ranges is compatible with aliphatic solvent-based and wax-based products for wood”, Rossitza elaborates. “These are eco-friendlier colourants for products, based on natural materials such as plant oils and waxes. Our colourants are recommended not only for colouration of wood, but also for products preserving the wood and renewing and polishing of wooden surfaces.”

Delivering excellence that stretches back over 200 years

THE NEW GLOBAL PIGMENTS POWERHOUSE

The Heubach name is synonymous with innovation, attention to customer needs and reliability in creating colors. Today’s Heubach is a global industry leader with one of the world’s most complete portfolios of organic, inorganic and anti-corrosive pigments, pigment preparations, dyes and specialty materials. With a global manufacturing footprint including 19 facilities around the globe, Heubach is committed to a reliable supply of high-quality materials to meet customers demanding production environments. Sustainability is a part of the Heubach DNA.

Heubach off ers innovative color solutions for virtually every application.

• Corrosion protection • Decorative, industrial, automotive and wood coatings • Coloration of plastics applications • Conventional and digital printing, inks, inkjet inks, and electrophotographic toners • Special applications for home and personal care, aluminum, agricultural coatings, stationery, viscose, latex, and leather

Brighter Colors – Brighter Life www.heubachcolor.com

Dr. Wörndle answers our question about who the Heubach Group wants to target with its products: “This is not in the first instance the parquet installer, but rather his or her provider of raw materials. Any manufacturer of colourful wood or colour blends is our customer. They can use our readymade colour blends and apply these on their wood products, both on new floors and while refurbishing old wooden floors.”

“We also target customers who are impregnating wood”, concludes Rossitza Dimitrova. “The impregnation of wood can be done by using different methods, e.g using vacuum, high pressure, high temperature, wax, chemicals, etc. In the process of impregnating the wood, along with the wax and the chemicals for preservation of the wood customers add our colorants to simulate natural wood finishes, such as rare, indigenous types of wood, which can’t be used for mass production. This has a lot of advantages, as we can meet any design demand. Connected to sustainability, this allows our customers to use pinewood for example, which grows fast and can be replanted easily. After the treatment process employing colourants, the final finish can simulate rosewood, oak, teak or other exotic species. This is protecting indigeneous or slowgrowing types of wood, which in turns is protecting our environment.”

www.heubachcolor.com

Photo – DevoNatural®

One way of giving a floor a different colour is to paint it. The disadvantage of that is that you cover the wood grain completely so that you can’t see the original grain at all. Nowadays, it’s popular to preserve the natural look of the wood and this is precisely where pre-colouring comes into the picture. Indeed, you can permanently change the original colours of your wooden floor, whilst the structure of the wood and the grain remain both visible and intact.

The most important reason to pre-colour your wooden floor is to give it a new look. It avoids the need to replace an existing floor, whilst you give an existing floor covering a new lease of life. Pre-colouring is absolutely ideal for providing a lighter or, by contrast, a darker shade. Yet there’s more than just that. Pre-colouring is also an excellent treatment to counteract the discolouration of wood and it’s also one way of providing an ‘aged’ look.

From dark to lighter

What makes pre-colouring a floor so attractive is that it’s a simple way of giving a wooden floor a different effect. Is the existing floor too dark? If so, you can turn to an increasingly wider range of pre-colouring agents to make it lighter. For instance, you can opt for a whitewash treatment or a greyed finish, which also makes the floor somewhat lighter.

From light to dark (or darker) and countering discolouration

It’s just as easy to go the other way. A floor which is too light for the client’s taste can be made darker thanks to various pre-colouring agents. On the other hand, if you want to counteract discol-ouration, there are various sorts of wood lye to counteract discolouration from the light. These wood lyes are suitable for several wood sorts, but you must check in advance whether or not a wood lye is suitable for counteracting discolouration in the wood sort which you want to treat.

Aged or smoked effect

On the contrary, perhaps you want to obtain a weathered or smoked effect? That, too, is possible via the use of pre-colouring agents. One producer which specialises in aged effects is Rubio Mono-coat, a firm which has introduced a new development in pre-colouring. Pre-colouring used to be done with a stain, which was usually reactive or water-based, but Blanchon has developed an agent to absorb the drawbacks of that perfectly. The traditional and multiple streaks, the overlapping, and the colour fading are absorbed by a special product (Pre-Aging), which is also easily applied using a Woodboy.

What it boils down to is that they use a product which looks reactive, but avoids the burden of streaks, overlaps, and colour fading. Moreover, it works on all sorts of wood and does it better than the previous generation of reactive stains. You can go from a lighter to a darker smoked look where colours can be mixed, depending on the required end result. They have also considered the greyed (and also mixable) grey variants so that it is possible to apply a deep colouring with subtle high-lights. Another big advantage of this product is that it can also be deployed as an end finish. After all, it isn’t based on a saturation principle, but, on the contrary, on the creation of a reaction with the wood fibre. And so, you don’t apply a film with an open top layer over the floor, but you aim for a molecular compound between the wood and the oil, something which we’ve covered at length in a previous edition. What it boils down to is that the wood structure remains untouched and at the same time the floor still enjoys maximum protection.

Sources: Info houtvanuwvloer.nl and Rubio Monocoat.

What’s on the market ?

Bona

Bona has lots of products for colouring wooden floors. For instance, there is Bona Craft Oil 2K, a 2-component parquet oil based on vegetable oils. This dries rapidly and provides durable protection. It is the ideal finish for sometimes troublesome wood sorts such as kambala, afzelia, and walnut. It can also be used on smoked oak and steamed beech. Bona Craft Oil 2K ensures a highly attractive and waterproof and stain-proof surface. It can be supplied as standard in 19 modern colours (including the two new colours added to the already rich colour range). The colours can be mixed with each other infinitely. Moreover, it is also possible to create extra colour shades with products from the same assortment, namely Bona Mix Colour, Bona Nordic Tone, and Bona Rich Tone. Bona Craft Oil 2K can serve as a finish, but it can also be lacquered over (exclusively) with Bona Traffic HD parquet lacquers.

Ciranova

Ciranova is the reference when it comes to color your wooden floor with water-based color stains for on-site use or industrial application. Reactive Stains interact chemically with the natural tannins inside the wood and this interface creates very unique finishes. There are endless possibilities in combination with coloured oils. (reaction time +/- 6 hours). Aquastain is a new water-based pigment stain based on micro pigments for staining all types of wood for indoor use. Aquastain provides a uniform coloring that accentuates the woodgrain. (drying times +/- 3 to 4 hours). After drying, the stains can be finished with oil or waterborne finishes, such as our new PLUS RANGE to achieve an invisible finish and natural appearance. It is also possible to finish the stains with our coloured Hardwaxoils, creating unique finishes and endless possibilities.

DevoNatural®

For pre-colouring parquet and wooden floors, Devomat offers clients two lines of products: DevoNatural® Easy Colour (a vegetable colour stain) and DevoNatural® Reactive (a reactive distress product with smoked effect for ‘oak’ parquet and wooden floors). In addition, DevoNatural® Floor Paint is a covering universal water-dilutable adhesion primer based on vegetables. It can be applied to various substrates such as wood, stone, concrete, synthetics, etc. DevoNatural® Floor Paint serves as a covering primer and can be finished further with any DevoNatural® varnish. Since the launch of DevoNatural® Easy Colour, Devomat has noticed that, despite the convenience of the product, more floors are once again being coloured. There is a growing demand for unique

colour combinations e.g. the floor is distressed with DevoNatural Reactive and then finished with a coloured DevoNatural® High Solid Oil. For DevoNatural® Easy Colour Devomat also offers the option of creating customised colours. Both product lines can be applied on site, in the workshop, or in the factory. DevoNatural® Easy Colour gives a deeper colour to the entire floor, whilst a colour oil will highlight mainly the grain and only to a lesser extent the surface. DevoNatural® Reactive is a reactive product and cannot be compared to a colour oil or another colouring product. The distressing effect depends on the tannic acid content and thereby differs from plank to plank. This gives a unique look to each parquet floor. Both products can be finished with any DevoNatural® finish product (lacquers, oils, or beeswax).

OSMO

OSMO OIL STAIN: ONE PRODUCT – TWO COLOUR INTENSITIES Osmo Oil Stain is a richly coloured wood stain that can be layered to create various colour intensities without any visible transitions. One coat applied with a brush, roller or trowel and buffed achieves a transparent look showing the natural wood grain. A second coat intensifies the colour. For applications on flooring, a final top coat with Osmo Polyx®-Oil is required to protect the pigments against wear. Available in warm browns, trend greys, white and black. Oils enhance the colour and grain of the wood. Oil Stain 3519 Neutral counteracts this effect resulting a raw wood look.

Tover

Thanks to the water-based stain Belle Epoque by Tover, you can renovate a wooden floor on site with the possibility of changing the colour of the wood or accentuating its aged appearance. Belle Epoque is available in many shades of grey, beige, brown and black and you do not risk overlaps or marks using it, since it can be applied with a roller and then evened out with a buffing machine. You can get a homogeneous effect on all wood species and a multitude of different chromatic outcomes if you cover it with neutral or coloured oils. Water-based oxidants – Bosch Vej, Ciair, Antique, Fossil - are also available for smoked, bleached and greyed finishes. Their more or less intense reaction with the tannin of the wood promotes unique achievements. You can easily overcoat them with all Tover finishings to give value to the wood floor and enhance its strong personality: yours!

Plastor

PLASTOR, a specialist in floor protection products, offers the ‘Colour Floors’ tint for colouring and personalising all floors. This water-based product is ideal on new and old parquet floors. It colours your various wood sorts in the interior durably and deeply thanks to 15 intense and mixable colours. In practice, as soon as the surface is completely sandpapered, you start applying the product from the edges of the room along the length of the parquet planks in zones of 3 or 4m², using a flat brush. Then you roller the product for the rest of the room in a thin coat over the entire surface. Let the product soak in for two minutes, then brush off with a lint-free cloth or a single brush with a white pad, and then brush the skirting boards off. If the sides turn out lighter, you can go over them again with a lint-free cloth soaked in the Colour Floors tint. Allow the whole to dry for two hours. Then, apply the UNIVERSAL undercoat PRIM'sO directly to the dry tint, not the sandpapered tint. Allow the PRIM'sO at least 45 minutes to dry and then apply a PLASTOR varnish of your choice.