How a Waterjet Company Cuts Custom Tile Medallions
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.
