A look at how vinyl is manufactured.

Today, some would say that living without vinyl is impossible.  There are products made of vinyl, such as packaging for our food and drink, trim for all cars and safety pieces for professional athletes.

With such a large presence in our lives, you would think vinyl flooring would consist of a simple, age-old process, that could be repeated as needed.  However, this is not the fact.

Vinyl flooring production uses highly sophisticated techniques, precise systems and complex methods.  All of these provide you with high performance, high quality and beautiful vinyl flooring. 

A new process has recently been developed, which offers you even more durable, fashionable and beautiful choices.

Please continue to read and increase your knowledge while we explain how vinyl flooring is made.

Perhaps your knowledge regarding vinyl after reading this will turn you and your home into one that is decorated with one of life’s most popular products.

The rotogravure process spins out unlimited choices. The rotogravure printing process is the most commonly used method for making residential vinyl floors.  It offers you a number of possibilities in design and pattern.

The process of rotogravure involves a print cylinder that spins around while the vinyl's core layer (called the gel coat) passes underneath.

Various coloured ink dyes are printed systematically by the cylinder.

A clear wearlayer is applied to the surface after the print dyes are set.

The appearance retention of a rotogravure vinyl floor is dependent on the durability of the clear wearlayer.


Know this about vinyl flooring. The wearlayer is crucial to the performance of your vinyl floor.  The thickness of the wearlayer varies with each vinyl product series or collection and is normally measured in mils.
The thickness of a mil is about the same as a page in your telephone book.

A 10-mil wearlayer would comparable in thickness to 10 pages of your telephone book.

Normally, more expensive vinyl floors will have thicker wearlayers.

The expectations of how long your vinyl floor will look attractive and new are based on the wearlayer’s performance.

In order to understand the capabilities of wearlayers, we need to define the performance characteristics that you need to look for in vinyl.

These performance characteristics can be divided into several areas:

    Easy to clean up stills.
    Doesn’t show scratches easily.
    Resists staining from normal household products.
    Stays looking like new.
    Easy to clean

The characteristic of being easy to clean relate to how hard it is to remove soiling and other marks from the floor’s surface.

If your floor begins to look drab and old, it is most likely caused by hundreds of hairline scratches in the wearlayer.

These scratches evolve from grit, dirt and sand that lay around on the wearlayer’s surface.

However, the new generation of vinyl flooring has all of the components that resist showing wear and staining.

Also, the style, value and beauty of vinyl put it in the running as a potential floor for your home and home life.

This concludes our section on how vinyl is made. If you’re looking for flooring that offers many distinctive choices, built-in beauty and easy care, plus hard to beat value, this product should be on your shopping list.