Finalizing the design for the tile medallions for our church floor took weeks, with lots of input from friends, family, and fellow parishioners.  I will spare you my adventures as a "sales person" convincing the powers that be that it was worth raising the money to have them made.  There were five designs in the end, ranging in width from about three feet to five feet.  Each was a unique design, a total custom job, and we needed a waterjet company willing and able to fabricate the medallions from porcelain tile that we provided.

The first step was choosing tile colors and patterns,  Most pictures of floor medallions that I've seen incorporated natural stone, especially marble floor tiles, or granite etc.  The Color Blox line from Crossville Empire series, and Color Blox Too, were great for providing essentially solid colors, but in hues that evoked nature... browns, dark blues, grays, rusty reds etc. They had great names like "Night Night" and "Powdered Sugar." We also incorporated some of the Florida Tile field tile colors (Savanah Carriage Gold and Plantation Beige), as well as additional Florida Tile patterns like Scottish Blue and Scottish Red, Montana Green and Banded Taupe.

Several each of these tiles were delivered to JIT Waterjet in Green Isle, MN.  An engineer there took my drawing files and transfered them to CAD, and he designed the specific cuts the machine would make to divide the drawing into workable pieces of tile. 

 

As amazing as the waterjet machine is, the porcelain tiles did give it some problems.  Some of the tiles had to be annealed (re-fired in a kiln) to keep them from cracking.  But the kiln sometimes changed the color of the tiles if they were re-fired, so then the engineer had to redesign the cuts until he got something that would not crack the tile.

 

My medallion designs were more complex than the usual floor medallion (you often see rosettes, compasses etc. in ready-to-install floor medallions you can buy).  Each one resulted in dozens of pieces, ranging in size from an inch or two all the way up to almost a foot wide.  It was like setting a jigsaw puzzle to place all the pieces in their correct order.

 

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Porcelain tiles are a relatively recent arrival in flooring options for home remodelers, as well as for commercial use.  But they have become very popular, for both their durability and the variety of colors and styles available.  It is for the latter point that they make an attractive choice for use in waterjet medallions.  I would like to share my experience designing waterjet medallions that were cut from porcelain tile, although most of the information I share could apply to medallions cut from natural stone or wood as well, since the waterjet can be used with those mediums as well (and pretty much any other material you might want to cut).

When the opportunity arose for me to design some medallions for the new floor of my church, I was both excited and terrified.  It was a huge responsibility, and I was not quite sure what a feasible waterjet design entailed.  In other words, I knew the waterjet was an amazing invention, but realistically how detailed could the design be for a floor medallion?  With some tips from a designer who had done this before, as well as directions from the waterjet cutting company, I learned a lot about waterjet medallion design.

When you are coming up with the design, it is helpful to think of it as a jigsaw puzzle.  The tiles that will be used in your waterjet design will likely be 12 x 12 or 18 x 18 inch tiles if you are using porcelain.  Now imagine the pieces of your design being cut from these tiles.  If you are creating a two inch wide ring that is three feet in diameter, for example, it will take several cuts pieced together to create the ring.  Now think of a small detail in your design, and imagine that it will be a tiny piece of tile set into the medallion as a whole. 

As a general rule, you don’t want to create tiny pieces.  Porcelain tile is durable, yes, but if you cut it narrow enough it could snap easily.  Hopefully when it is in place in its bed of thinset, it will be more stable, but err on the side of caution.  The smallest width of the pieces in my design was about ½” .  I actually had narrower details in the design, but those were not rendered with waterjet.  More on that in a later entry. 

As far as what is realistic and feasible for the waterjet medium, think cartoons rather than photographs.  Not that you need to have a cartoony looking medallion, but consider that you are working with pieces of tile that butt up next to each other, not an airbrush that can finesse shadows or gradients of color.  If you need to have a design with that kind of realistic-looking detail, you would be better off with screen printing the tile.

Here is an example of a medallion design, and then what it looked like when some of the pieces were cut from porcelain tile with the waterjet:

 

 
Most waterjet companies can take any drawing/design and put it into their CAD software for the waterjet machines.  In my case, I am used to working with Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector graphics program.  Originally my designs, which were too complicated, were created in Photoshop, but transferring them to Illustrator helped me grasp the concept of what it would take to make a medallion design that could be cut with a waterjet from porcelain tile. 

On the left is the original concept.  On the right is the final layout for the waterjet medallion:

 

The outline of each shape would be the path the waterjet would take in cutting the tile.  The solid colors I used in my design represented the individual tile colors that would be incorporated into the medallion.

The process of designing our custom waterjet medallions is pretty involved, but I will try to pull out nuggets of the experience in my future blog entries on the waterjet medallion project. 

Posted by Caeli at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, my wife and I became public nuisances last month.  Here in the great white north, there is something called Oak Wilt sweeping through the oaks on many a wooded lot, and my lot is no exception.  Each year, the city's department of forestry comes by and marks the dead or dying trees with an orange dot, indicating they require us to remove the trees in the fall.  We also receive a notice of public nuisance to make us feel guilty about it, as if it's our fault the oaks are diseased.

This year, our fourth on this lot, we had 2 trees to take out.  These were between our house and our neighbor's, near the fence for our backyard.  Last year, a friend took much of the oak for winter firewood, and so we arranged a time to take out these two and he'd again take the wood. 

The appointed hour arrived and we got started.  The first tree, the thinner one, came out fairly easily.  We made it fall towards the front of the house and in short order we had the logs in the truck and the smaller branches set aside for recycling.  Then came the bigger one.  The plan was, cut it about six feet up and make it fall towards the backyard.  We had a space between the house and the next tree of about 25 feet, so you'd think we could make it fall in the right direction. 

After the trunk was notched, the final cut was make...crooked.  So, instead of falling along the notch, it fell about 75 degrees to the left, and right onto my house! 

The next two hours were most interesting.  With the tree on the house, we had to figure out how to get it off without damaging the shingles, the windows, or each other.  It turns out, we did a little bit of all three.  First off, my friend went up on our roof and cut down most of the branches that were above the house.  We managed to get those down and out of the way, leaving us with the trunk.  After several failed attempts to pull the thing off of the roof, we decided upon a different tactic. 

We decided to cut from the bottom, figuring that the shorter and shorter tree would then slide off of the roof.  The first cut was OK, but the tree didn't get all the way off the roof.  By this time, some of those shingles on the outside edge were in tough shape, but there was nothing we could do about that.  The second cut was not so good.  As the tree came down off the roof, it rotated, sliding along the house and ending up wedged in a window frame.  Luckily, the window was ok.  Not so lucky was my left hand, which ended up pinned between the tree and the fence.  Nothing was broken, but there was a nasty gash in my little finger. 

Help was summoned in the form of my father-in-law, who recommended we tie off the remaining tree and use a truck to pull it off the house.  That did the trick and 35 minutes later, the tree was cut and loaded up.  There are many lessons, but the main one is to cut the final cut for the trunk parallel to the ground.  That one little error was the root cause of the problem... which made the project take hours longer than necessary and ended with six stitches to close up that gash in the hand.  We probably should have used the truck and rope from the start as well.  In the end, no permanent damage to life or property, but it was not the way we planned to spend our morning.

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Our 1980s era house does not have asbestos floor tiles.  However this issue and many related ones have kept me away from blogging and anything else to do with our own home lately.  That's because I've been serving on a floor replacement committee at my church, and dealing with some very interesting issues.

While my experience in home remodeling (via the many projects we have taken on in our homes) has come in handy while serving on this committee, something I had not had to deal with in our houses was asbestos.  However, this did come up when my parents bought their 1901 Victorian home.  In their case, the asbestos was located in insulation on the heating pipes in the basement.  I have memories of the basement being sealed off with plastic and men in protective coveralls, gloves and head gear carrying out the sealed garbage bags. I was glad that most of the spider webs went with them!

The asbestos problem at the church is different.  In fact, it was debatable whether it was even necessary for us to deal with the asbestos tiles at this point. The asbestos tile flooring dates back to circa 1920, and in the intervening years had been covered with other layers. Most recently, when the mauve carpet was installed in the 1980s, a new particle board layer was placed on top of the other floors, then the carpet.

We were pretty sure, because of the date of the floor, that those old tiles were in fact asbestos, but we had to have it tested to confirm it. Core samples were drilled all over the building. The tests confirmed asbestos in the main body of the church, the sacristy and the altar boy’s room.

So should we remove the asbestos?  That was the hot topic.  Asbestos floor tiles are not so dangerous as something like asbestos insulation, which more easily goes airborne, which everyone knows due to the legal ads on TV, causes mesothelioma.  Asbestos tiles are hard and don't break very easily.  The fibers are not likely to end up floating around in the air, so the chance of someone inhaling an asbestos particle into their lung and getting cancer is much less likely.

Moreover, the asbestos was completely covered by several layers of flooring and subflooring.  It was not dangerous.  But knowing it was there, and many people either suspected or knew it was there, some church goers might be worried about it.

For our floor committee the point that tipped the scale toward removing the asbestos tiles had to do not so much with mesothelioma or any other danger from asbestos, but with providing a good structure for our new floor.  We had decided to replace the carpeting with porcelain tile, and with that much square footage, we were concerned about cracks from deflection.  We could reduce risk of cracking if we had a nice solid base with no decaying layers of old flooring beneath it. The fact that we were taking care of the asbestos issue for now and all time was an added benefit.  I'm happy to say that our church has gotten in the habit of biting the bullet and doing it right the first time when we take on projects.  (It's a lesson learned the hard way.)  So the asbestos tiles are being removed by an asbestos abatement crew.  Every door to the church is sealed.  But when all is said and done, the floor will be taken down to the original wood.  Then the cement backer board will be installed, and the tile on top of that, so we should be set for a hundred years or so.

Posted by Caeli at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)