How to kill a dance floor.
After murderous tap shoes with loose screws ripping and gouging into your unsuspecting floor, the next major villain is the sun.
Direct sunshine onto your dance floor can affect your vinyl surface with a result similar to throwing a brick into a swimming pool, a mess of wave like ripples. You can see these horrors rising and falling in tune with the passing rays.
Gluing the floor down might slow this, but old Mr Sun is a vindictive chap.
The UV component in sunshine attacks and breaks down the plasticizers in the vinyl, the bits that make it supple and alive.
Without these plasticizers, the floor becomes brittle and prone to cracking when the floor is. Once this happens the results are irreversible. You can assist the faded colour but you can’t bring these dead friends back to life.
There is also the potential to drown your floor.
Large or regular amounts of water can cause your sub floor to delaminate, swell, create soft spots and ultimately fall apart. It can cause glued vinyl to develop bumps, ridges, peaking, curling and bubbles.
We are talking flooding here not about your regular cleaning with a relatively dry mop, but even a dripping air-conditioner can cause isolated injuries over time.
More sinister however is the “Black Death”.
This is mould, those smelly black spots that find a warm moist spot and start breeding and inviting their friends to the party. This disgusting orgy has been long established as a health problem and can include upper respiratory tract symptoms, coughs, and wheezes in otherwise healthy people not to mention children.
https://www.cdc.gov/mold/faqs.h
Burn baby Burn.
Straight out heat while not necessarily fatal is an excellent torture. It can, like an Irish kneecapping, result in a long-term disability. To lock up and leave your studio during the hottest months can lead to a lot of the symptoms of direct sunlight: shrinking, gapping and rippling, not to mention tapes and even glue losing their grip on things.
So get your Inspector Morse, Miss Marple, Sherlock or Poirot and investigate any damp smells, aging guttering and dodgy plumbing. Get your Watsons, Lewises and Johnos to arrest any attempts by tap criminals to start a dance class without having their shoes checked and make sure there is a cover up of curtains blinds and at least some film on any windows. Look at running your air conditioning out of hours and ways generally to limit the build-up of excess heat.
Happy Dancing!
Martin
