Event Highlights
PPC Meeting Feb 25 2020 Hardscape School
Steve: Greg.
Greg: Yes?
Steve: Where’d you put that agenda?
Greg: Should be a copy on their underneath that sheet.
Steve: There it is, thanks.
[silence]
Steve: Welcome to the Hardscape School. Our effort to increase the knowledge and skills of contractors in the Hardscape industry started 15 years ago. There were a lot of people that helped me when I first got into the industry as a contractor. Our problem at that time was that we had interlocking concrete pavers, and there wasn’t enough information being shared.
We started the Hardscape school, excuse me, back then it was Paver school. Still, as our contractors’ missions have increased, we’ve recently changed the name to the Hardscape school, to cover all the general products that the contractors in our industry will be dealing with.
Recently, last year in HNA in Louisville, I met Giovanni for the first time, and he spoke to many of the same issues that we’ve experienced in the interlocking concrete pavement business from a contractor perspective, installations, specifications and so on. Giovanni and I thought it might be a good time to bring together some people to start the discussion on how best to deal with the issues and the, and I wouldn’t say confusion.
Confusion works. It’s a proper word. Inconsistencies in our industry and how we tell contractors or how contractors are told to install a product they’re not familiar with. Luckily, I have two of my main instructors. I have Greg Ambrose, who’s the lead instructor for the school, many, many years now. I have another expert, Pat McCrindle, who’s been a friend. Both these guys have been friends of mine for an often-long time, long before we had our relationship with the school.
With their expertise and their hard work, we’ve set up the demonstration area, and now they’re participating and making sure we head down the right path. We talked about installation specifications, standards, and guidelines. The format is fairly loose. You have your agenda. Please interrupt, please ask questions, interject anytime you want because what we’re trying to do, the best thing is to come to some, or start the discussion and maybe come up with some solutions during this first meeting of the porcelain pavement council.
Does anybody have any questions about where we’re at, what we’re doing, who we are? Nope? Pretty clear? [inaudible 00:03:53] Now, I’d like to go around the tables, starting with you.
Francesco Cavallini: I am Francesco Cavallini from Cronos, USA. We are producing together with [unintelligible 00:04:11], only 2cm, and we are in the States from 2015. Probably, we were one of the first actively producing in the States, 2 cm material, three quarter an inch material. We are pretty happy to stay together with you today because it is the first time even from my side to have the possibility to share not only with my colleague internal of my market and the problem of the market because again, 2 cm material, three quarter an inch material, it is a different animal for everybody.
What I want to say just to speak not too much, it is we are extremely focused in developed 2 cm, three-quarter-inch tiles. We are selling and producing only 2 cm tiles, three-quarter inch which it makes a huge difference inside our industry because other companies are producing regular tiles, slabs. We are only concentrated in this business and we are here to understand from your side what we can do because we know material is brand new and there are a lot of possibilities inside the production plant to do what the market and what this product needs to make the material sellable. Thank you, everybody.
Steve: Thank you.
Francesco: We need to stick together.
Don Haines: I’m Don Haines, floor and tile manufacturer of 2 cm and other. I’m excited to get together because we’ve been operating in two separate worlds, install and manufacture, and we cross but we don’t talk. I’m happy to see this come together.
Ryan Marino: I’m Ryan Marino with the Tile Council of North America. For those of you that aren’t aware, we’re a trade association representing tile manufacturers and manufacturers of related materials all produced in North America. I’m the standards development and research manager. We’re here today because we’re investigating the possibility of creating a product specification for 2 cm and 3 cm tiles. We’d like to understand a little bit better what the issues are, and by understanding those issues, we can make a better standard. Thank you.
Greg Ambrose: Greg Ambrose, contractor, consultant to the industry and I’m here actually to represent the school and to see what we can do together to make this a little bit more controlled from an installation side. Our feel out in the fields, it’s a little bit of a Wild West on the specifications. Having seen what happened with the ICPI and how they were able to drive a little bit of the market and quality and make that a focal point. I think this is a good opportunity to be here. Looking forward to try and get some standards if we can for installation. That’s what I would like to take away from.
Pat McCrindle: Clark Kent, superhero.
[laughter]
Pat McCrindle: I always wanted to do that. I think I do that with all my clients. Pat McCrindle, contractor 35 years in the Hardscape industry. I was heavily involved with the ICPI and worked with Greg and few other people writing certification manuals and so forth and worked with Steve closely and the other members. I did anything from municipality commercial to residential, a lot of higher-end work. We basically laid anything but eggs.
We did all types of natural stone and Travertine and tile. Currently, now I’m working with GST. It’s a cleaning and sealing company, but I’m still very involved in the Hardscape industry with the school and teaching and so forth. I’m excited about this because, again, as Greg said, when the ICPI established standards for the interlocking concrete paver community, it was exciting.
It really changed the whole perspective of not only the manufacturing and contractors. It created a nice unison; everybody had the same thought process. We want to put a lot in the ground, we want to do it right, and hopefully, this is a first step into getting to that. That’s why I’m here.
Giovanni Ricetti: I started on the paver industry in 1994 in South Florida, which is [?] everywhere else. Seven years ago, I’m the founder of Hardscape.com. I left the installation business and became a distributor, and today I’m here also representing Saxon brass, which bought a majority of our company here in the United States.
It goes mutual, and we want to see this product is installed correctly and help the industry grow for everybody. When I spoke with Steve, we seem to think alike. I’m happy that we’re here today to be able to help everybody as much as we can. I’m eager to learn as well. We’ve got very great people here today that can share a lot of experience with us.
Steve: If we think alike, you’re in trouble.
[laughter]
Giovanni: Are you fucking right now?
Steve: I’m going there. It’s recording, remember.
[laughter]
Phil Graves: That’s basically it. All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Phil Graves. I’m the Sales Director for Daltile’s outdoor living program called Exteriors. A relatively new program, only been around since March 12th of last year. We’re new to the field. I’m not new to Hardscapes. I have got 17 years in Hardscapes. I sold Belgard pavers for a couple of years in Texas.
I was 13 years with Techniseal; then, we were re-acquired by Old Castle towards the end of my duration with Techniseal. I’ve been all over the country. I know most of the producers from Concrete Pavers, most of the top contractors, a couple of which are right here and most of the dealers across the United States as well. Which we also have one right here.
Like everybody else in the room, I’m very happy to have the opportunity to be here and be part of this meeting. Very much looking forward to setting some reasonable installation standards for porcelain tiles in outdoor applications so that we can get people inside the guard rails where right now there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of hesitation. That’s probably the biggest thing. There is confusion, but that confusion is leading to people not wanting to touch the product, and we’ve got to get past that. That’s it.
Dave Schroeder: I’m Dave Schroeder. I’m with MRP [?]. We’re here in [?] because we deal with pedestals. We are on top of the rooftops, and with everything with wind uplift and all the different tests for that. We hope that this is going to lead to something that’s just like a run test for wind uplift, run tests for everything. There sound to be numerous tests for different things for the rooftop pedestals.
I brought Jose Gutierez from Illinois Brick. They’re one of our distributors for this, and Jose Oreos with Illinois Brick has installed numerous roofs with the pedestals. We were asked to bring him up. If there are any questions on the pedestals, we have somebody that installed thousands of square feet of this.
Jose Gutierrez: As Dave mentioned, I’m Jose Gutierrez. I am a Hardscape salesman for Illinois Brick out of Chicago. I specialize in rooftop sales, and exactly like he said, I’ve been installing for years before I started selling the product.
Steve: You’ve done all installations for–
Jose Gutierrez: All installations with porcelain from installing on-grade concrete gravel base, sand base pedestals, even on wood decking. We’ve pretty much installed it all.
Steve: That’s some great background for everybody here. I think we’ve got a nice mixture of interests from the industry, to get the conversation rolling so we can get to– When’s it supposed to come up? When are we going to do expectations of that now?
Greg: We’re supposed to [?] the applications now.
Steve: What I’d like to do is ask you all, or we can go around the room again. You’ve all invested time and money to be here because it’s of obvious interest to you and the people you work with and for. That would be nice to hear your expectations without knowing much about what we were setting up and going to do here. What would you like to have come out of this meeting at the end of today?
Francesco: From my side of course is, the best results for me are to understand if everybody is in the same boat because again, 2cm, 3cm, 4cm, 5cm’s, out of that porcelain. Physically speaking, the same material but different animals. Materials for
rooftop application and for [?] from my point of view, I’ve seen that they are a little bit different in terms of technical specs.
Steve: Okay. I’ll make a comment here, Steve Jones. We were lucky enough to have a very tenacious technical person from the Tile Council of North America, Ryan wanting to participate. The original concept for this meeting was a small group. They could get along and just start the discussion. The fact that we were just going to have a small group get together, got out. And pretty soon there were requests from a lot of different interests and people and we’re going to go way, wait a minute. We don’t yet until yesterday we didn’t have an agenda.
[laughter].
Steve: Again, with the guidance and leadership from, Greg and Pat, we were able to bring that together. I knew we could, but we just wanted a small group to start the formation of our ideas and thoughts and stuff, which will help guide the growth of those industry specifications. After a couple of no’s and finally a realization by me that there are interests involved, like one, the association involved in this. I appreciate your persistence, Ryan.
Ryan: Thank you. Ryan Marino. Really, as I mentioned earlier, what I’d like to get out of today is just to understand what the needs are. From the installer perspective. As I mentioned before, we’re a trade association. We represent manufacturers, but when we develop standards, we’re developing standards for the industry. We’re not developing it for a subgroup. We’re trying to make a standard that improves the industry.
Being able to take feedback from the installation community is vital in the development of our product standard. It also gives us other opportunities if we want to develop industry specifications in terms of installation as well and develop those into something beyond this group, whether that be, SDM standard or an ANC standard or something that can eventually make its way into the TC in a handbook. All of those things, I think our possibilities are really today. It’s just to learn, to understand what the needs are and then see what we can do as part of our product specifications to benefit this community.
Steve: We’re grateful that you are here.
Ryan: Thank you.
Greg: Greg Ambrose again. Really, my main takeaway would be to get the start of some standards for installation just from a selfish reason to educate installers on the installation process, what is right. With them not knowing they’re doing whatever they want and that’s not benefiting manufacturers, it’s not benefiting the installers and certainly isn’t benefiting the industry.
Ideally, what I would like to see is for us to come away with some kind of dos and don’ts. A list of what we can have and what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do for starting specifications or a learning opportunity.
Pat: Pat McCrindle. The way that I look at it as a contractor and the biggest issues I had as a contractor was really understanding new concepts and new products and what is the right way. We’re charging premium money for product and premium money for installation. I think the foremost important thing would be a recipe for success. When I say recipe for success, the dos and don’ts and what Greg and I tried to establish and when we go down and look at everything that we put together in the five or six different applications that we showed, these are all ways that contractors are currently installing product.
What we’re looking at is as a proving ground, if these installation methods and techniques that they’re currently using identify the problems, try to eliminate the problems by choosing the right way to do it. I think this is the first step. Recipe for success. As Phil said, most of the contractors that see the porcelain, they’re scared to undertake it because whether regionally if it’s a freestyle cycle or if you’re in Florida. I said, no disrespect, I apologized before we started.
Lara is the old scrape and rape. There’s just so many things to look at throughout the country and how things are being done. I just want to provide them without the agony of going through losing money on installations and being sued and so forth. We can eliminate that for the fact that we have a lot of experience in this room and it’s a great start. I think this is far beyond what I anticipated and the attendees being here.
It’s going to be interesting and nobody’s shy, which is pretty good. Everybody wants to put in their two cents and that’s important. As we go downstairs and we hear the different comments, it’s really important that we make note of those comments and share the experience that you have with what you see. That’s my expectations.
Giovanni: Giovanni Ricetti here. I agree with what Pat and Greg have had talked about. I’d like to be able to see the continuation of what we’re doing here in the future for the industry, not for any particular company, not for any particular product. I think it’s important that we all understand that the group may grow and that if we set the standards today that this is what our intentions are as Greg and Pat and everybody else said that whoever joins us follow the same path.
We don’t start promoting things that doesn’t go with what we are doing here today. I love the industry and there’s lots of problems. I’m not familiar with some of the problems happening. I’m hearing about the problems outside of Florida. Florida again is a different world when it comes to hardscapes over there. When we go into some of the areas in the Northeast where I’m getting phone calls, “Hey, I did an install and it failed and I’m not sure how to get that done.”
I hope that we can achieve something here that I’ll be able to put that out there to the customers, to the consumers that are reaching out to us because it’s a lot of them with a lot of questions that I don’t think we have the right answers at the time. That’s what I am looking to get out of what we’re doing here. Thank you, everybody, by the way for participating.
Phil: All right. Phil Graves with Daltile. Too late in the rotation. Pretty much all the good comments are gone by the time it gets here. I’ll try to be very concise. My primary interest here and expectation and really hope. My primary interest is in the 2 cm porcelain right now at this time. My hope or my expectation I guess is of all the different installation types, the one that’s created the most confusion and the one that I think produces the most opportunity is the dry set or loose lay on gray.
As far as the pedestals go, no offense but it’s sort of a standard, this is how you do it. For the most part, and then for abounded on concrete, I don’t know if you’re using the right, you’ve got the right flag, the right setting material, and the right crowding material. You’re pretty much same.
It seems like most of the options on how to install are with more traditional hardscape installation, whether it’s dense-graded aggregate, clean aggregate. What I want to get out of today and beyond, and the sooner the better, frankly, is what are the recommendations for base [?] jointing an EDRA screened and why? Then where do you have some options on what to do for those different considerations?
Sort of a flowchart on here’s the best one. This is the reason why this is the best installation across geographies, across soil conditions and then what are some of the flowchart decision points? While you might go with a different jointing material or maybe a different type of base for instance. It’s that hardscape style installation is the one that I’m most focused on with this group.
Dave: Dave Schroeder, MRP support internal. Since we do the pedestals, mine’s mainly on the rooftop. It’s to learn if everybody else and sees if everybody else is having the same, I don’t want to say problem. Is that we are having with testing as far as getting a standard maybe for a wind-up lift test standard, for a fire test standard, for a lot of different, we’re all over the board with them. There’s somebody who’s got this test or wind-up lift. Somebody else has got this test and they pass it and I know–
Steve: [?]
Dave: Yes, there’s a lot of them. I can keep going. There’s a tremendous amount of different testing for the pedestals and that. That’s what I’m hoping to learn from this and see what we can come up with.
Jose: Jose Gutierrez, here. I’m just here to learn and listen to what you gentlemen would all recommend for installations that I can take back and teach other people, especially my contractors that I deal with on daily basis.
Steve: Excellent. Those are all, I think, achievable goals. We have to think about that we ask enough questions and document the answers that we get. You’ll have to excuse me as we move downstairs, I’ll move the recording down there from station to station as we talk about these things. We got to get it documented. If it slows it up a little bit, so be it.
Again, we don’t want to hesitate at all in asking questions, making comments and opinions are fine. Questions are perfect, allows us the opportunity to dig into it. We may not come to a conclusion on many items but that’s okay. It starts the discussion and it matures. Did anybody get downstairs?
Greg: No.
Steve: The next thing was we’re going to have a real quick walk around in the quick facility tour and the demonstration areas that Greg and Pat have prepared for us. Then I think it’ll give us a better visual when we have these discussions during the day before we go down and actually work those demo areas. Okay?
Greg: Okay.
Steve: Let’s all troop downstairs.
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Pat: Greg, I did not get your card. Steve, I did not get your card. Someone’s going to get these cards.
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Don: Mr. Jones, I’m going to drop the heat a couple of degrees in here.
Steve: What’s that?
Don: Said I’m going to drop it down a couple of degrees.
Steve: Yes. What’s saying?
Don: It’s currently at 68. I think there’s a fair amount of hot air in here.
Pat: I feel warm.
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Phil: I see a lot of [?] that makes us [?] or whatever. The New Orleans [?] or whatever.
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Steve: Greg, are you ready?
Greg: Yes, sir.All ready. What we have is just a little bit of a presentation, a food for thought. I’m not going to say it’s educational as much as it is informative and where some of the things that we’ve seen. We’re here. We know why we’re here, ideally. I did write down everybody’s their second bullet point.
Steve: You’re killing me.
[laughter]
Greg: I think I got it down to a [?] paragraph. I think we’re there. I wrote down whatever his work just in case at the end we want to go back to it and see, did we actually get what we thought we’re trying to get out of it or what’s may set agenda for the next meeting till we get that far? Why we’re here openly the way we set this thing up is because of things like this.
These are projects that I have been personally involved in from a legal standpoint throughout the United States. They’re projects that are basically identifying things that have gone wrong, porcelain jobs. To me, this is why we’re here to avoid things like this. Things like guys putting, if you can see it, two and three-quarters inch of screenings down and then setting two-centimeter porcelain on it.
This one over here they have two and a half inches of sand that they put down. If left without any standards, if left without any direction or any guidance, contractors are going to do what they are going to do. They’re going to do what’s simple. That’s really the point to it. In coming up with some of these things this is what we’re trying to look at. Joint material, these are poly sands that were put in there that we see couldn’t even get full depth because I am assuming there’s a lack of compaction.
They’re doing they didn’t know how to compact and then it wasn’t sticking, it wasn’t adhering to the porcelain which makes perfect sense why it wouldn’t. Again, maybe there are some different products standards that can be developed for that whether it be from porcelain guys or the polyester guys or just installation job. That’s what we’re trying to show there.
Joints. Ultimately here, aside from the material, what we’re looking at is things along the lines of inconsistent joints, excessive joints that are being placed in here, joints that aren’t lining up. Again, if they don’t know the standard, they’re going to do whatever. I can tell you that for sand. Anybody who’s installed we know it, Pat knows it, it’s one of those things. We’re going to do what we feel is right and a lot of this is just sheer–
It’s based on ignorance. That’s all. That’s not a bad or derogatory way. We’re just saying it’s a lack of knowledge.
Are there standards for joints, minimum, maximum, that we want to see? I know that there has been a lot of discussions. We’re setting up on that. Spacers, 100% all the time regardless you have to have spacers. This specific job didn’t have spacers. They just spaced it out and that’s why there were inconsistent joints in there. Now, one of the things, edge restraints. The discussion is that you don’t need edge restraints because of the large-format material. What happens when you get into something like this? We have smaller pieces. It’s still a flexible application to stick to Phil’s bullet point. His objective is, what are the standards for dry-set installations? What can we take back to our clients or prospects with it? That’s ultimately what we’re trying to figure out.
Edge restraints, are they necessary? When are they necessary? What type is proper? What’s the proper installation? These are all things that need to be dealt with one way or another and the contractor is not going to deal with it. That was proven by the ICPI. When they came up with their standards for installation.
This next one, again, this doesn’t speak as much to anything that we do as manufacturers or council or anything. This is just poor craftsmanship. That’s all. Just straight out poor quality. The issue is, is that this has a much, much greater effect on what we do. If people are out there and they look at an installation that looks like this because the homeowner didn’t know any better as what it should look like. How many people who are considering porcelain walk over this deck and go, “I don’t want that. I’m not looking for these large gaps around here.” If left alone this is what they do.
How do we cut in things like that? [?] decks are huge application for this? We see [?] decks quite a bit. When you come in your stringers on that. How do we deal with stringers? How can we cut in there? What is the type of installation that we’re looking for or what’s going to be best? If you’re noticing here on this one there’s no expansion or anything.
This happens to be the project that was set only two and a half inches of stone dust and it also has about a 12-inch base of aggregate underneath it. There’s nothing in between the coping and the porcelain as far as expansionary or anything like that goes which there probably should be something. That’s my guess, at least. We have materials that are moving a little bit different.
It’s a little bit more of a southern climate. We can already see that they started a little bit of chipping in that down in the corners here. What are the standards we could give them? Things like lippage. What’s acceptable lippage within the industry from tile to tile? What happens here is that this, they managed to grade this thing to a point where they had enough lippage that they were not only getting the collection of debris, but that’s actually molded there wrong.
They grew mold on porcelain. There you go. This is one of those interesting type things. What are the grades? Because of the smoother, slicker surface, is it less than 2%? Can it be 1.5%? Can it be 1%? What are we dealing with as far as grading the surface of these applications? What we’re looking, again, in this one from a quality standpoint, we see that it shouldn’t be acceptable. What are better methods? Maybe coring that. We see where you have bonds changing here. It’s just, generally, poor installations.
In my opinion, as Pat and I said here and put this together and Giovanni helped us, we came up with why we were here is to avoid this. These are projects that are out there. We can’t continue forward like this. It’s not good for what we’re trying to accomplish. What is our goal? Our goal is to come up with good installations. We have some pictures. We have some different things in here that we’re doing.
This happens to be one that’s down in Florida. You know what, one of the things we say it’s successful in Florida. It’s a three-to-one dry pack bedding, so sand to cement, three-to-one mix, dry pack laid with spacers and pedestal are small. What are those? Two-inch, three-inch roughly?
Pat: Three-inch.
Greg: Then it’s grouted which, “Yes.” You know I mean, grouting up north, grouting in Tennessee, grouting in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago isn’t going to happen. I don’t even think you should grout in Texas if it’s not on a concrete base, but there’s success. Is this a standard that we can back? If it’s successful, it’s at the very least an application that we can look to and track going forward to see if maybe that is something that can be considered. Success is what we want to try to build on. Here’s sand set on dense graded aggregate 24 by 24-inch tiles, so a good installation. We can see drains. You guys can point it out. Again, not to spend a lot of time on each one of these, but this is what the industry needs. This is what we want to have. That’s our goal is to give more installations like this. This is sand bedding over concrete.
The interesting part of this one is and it’s probably a little bit harder for you to see there, but the coping. The bond lines are continuous all the way through so there’s no separate coping. However, it has been mortared into place, so when we blow it up, you can see the bond lines coming through the custom work around the edges with the bull nosing. That’s a skill like operation there. That’s an excellent installation from that standpoint.
Can this be done? Absolutely. How is it done? In this instance, they’re mortaring down that coping and then they’re sand setting everything else in between.
Pat: Giovanni said they call that the infinity edge.
Giovanni: Yes. That’s what they call it down in Florida.
Greg: Bedding sand over concrete just another installation. Just showing you a traditional coping 24 by 24-inch product spacers. It has been jointed yet that’s why the joints are showing up the way they are, but we like it because it’s giving you good clean bond lines. You can pick those up very easily. We see consistent spacing, so it’s just, again, a little bit more of what we’re looking for.
Mortar set. As far as this one goes, these were just basically set in mud, just pads of mud, three, four-inch pads that they did. Again, non-freezing climate, something that can be done. This is an artificial turf that’s been placed around it, so it ends up working out. The 12-inch mortar bed, this is an edging. As you can see how our pieces kind of taper in, or what they did was they set these edges 12-inches minimum of mortar that’s coming out and then everything else is going to be set on sand in between.
It’s a way of holding it down. Without edge restraints, that’s what they were going to figure out. That’s an edge restraint. Good for them. They realize that it is necessary. They came up with a solution. Is it a cost-effective solution in this market? Perhaps, but it certainly isn’t one up in my market in Cleveland. How do we go to the next step with that? Which takes us back to one of our points which was the edge requirement.
In bedding in general, we have sand set with concrete curbs. What they’ve done in here is these have all been set on sand and then they’ve trenched out, poured curbs in here, and short curbs about four to five-inch concrete curbs and then laid the grass in between them so very unique installation. Our point is this is some of what we can do with porcelain when given the opportunity which I think is good.
The next thing we want to talk about with some unique applications. Now, we got to start get the juices flowing a little bit and see if we can get a little bit more into the discussions. We’ll go through these applications. It leads into our agenda from that standpoint and gives us a little bit more. First one we look at is vehicular. Can these things be used for vehicular applications? Great discussion point. I can only assume that it’s going to be discussed. These are 16 by 32s. They’re three-centimeter product.
Giovanni’s contractors had success doing this down in Florida. We have some short-term successes that are there. They’ve become test sites, if nothing else, where you can monitor it or watch it for the next three, four, and five years. Again, Florida is probably one of the more forgiving, if not the most forgiving market, from that standpoint. Again, if we can do this, if this is something that can be done, if we can create a standard that gives us large format porcelain that can be placed on a sand bedding for a vehicular application, that opens up an entirely other market for us. What are the standards for that type of an installation?
Jointing. In here, we can barely see. There are some spacers that have been placed and these are spacers that are placed from the top but are left in. They embed themselves into the sand, so it creates a much easier installation than trying to slip pedestals underneath here, a pedestal spacer. Again, this is probably one of the key points to the success of what’s going on there is that they are able to maintain consistent joints with those types of spacers.
When it’s all said and done, success is what we are after. Interesting things in here. It’s a running bond pattern. That’s not an interlocking pattern that we have in there. This is a project that I would say is going to garner a lot of attention and a lot of scrutiny, I would hope, to see if it can be successful. Curves, now if you do notice, they have this soldier in place and that happens to be full width mortared in place.
That’s what has become the edge restraint for this type of installation is these borders have been placed in here and those are mortared in place full-width so that’s a 16-inch mortared curb that’s been put in there. Giovanni, what’s the depth of that curve?
Giovanni: About four inches. Four, five inches.
Greg: It’s essentially your wet side into a concrete scratch path.
Giovanni: Yes.
Greg: Again, if done right, success. This is a project that Pat did. That he did where was? This was Northern Michigan?
Pat: Yes.
Greg: You want to talk a little bit about this one, Pat?
Pat: Yes, they had an existing wood deck that rotted. The joists were pretty good. They did whatever remediation on the deck. They just wanted to put something in it that was lasting. This was a product we found, the TI board, which basically structurally it’s 12 inches by 8 feet. You screw it down to the joists and you actually screed a quarter-inch concrete. What it does, it takes the flexibility out of the joist to make sure there’s no bouncing.
We screened the concrete in place and that was a very fast process. I was impressed with it. It was very contractor-friendly. The whole intention was to put porcelain on this. We put that out on top of the joist, a quarter-inch thick, then we applied an anti-fracture waterproofing membrane which, I think, was critical because I don’t want any type of, because of the freeze-thaw cycles and the extreme winters they have, I didn’t want any expansion and contraction that would cause the joints to propagate through, or have movement from the base crack through the [?] force. We put the anti-fracture membrane down. Then we use a half-inch notch trial. This was a spacer, and it again, there’s so many really cool spacers that are out there. This particular spacer came up from the base, and it was a screw top. But it basically screwed it until- and it was a lever. It was very nice. Then you just take those red caps off, snap it off, and they stay in place, and then you can [?] it. It’s a very nice clean installation.
Greg: We can see when it’s done. We have to. That’s a beautiful application. [crosstalk]
Steve: [crosstalk] these materials or you bought them? You bought them.
Pat: Yes, the two centimeters.
Steve: Two centimeters?
Pat: Yes. Again, the weight on that was only nine pounds per square foot. The [?] and the way they were set– Again, structurally, whether it’s 16-inch, 24 inch, a lot of the applications now, and I know in Pennsylvania, they’re doing a lot of wood deck replacement with the two centimeter porcelain. It’s a big market. It’s a really big market. There’s other- there’s rail systems. I thought this was kind of unique just because of the fact that it was a joist, it was a wooden joist. That’s a whole new market right there. Then they do have the rail systems, whether aluminum or plastic. There are many different systems that are out there. I believe in the brochure that you have, they actually–[crosstalk] Yes. Let me show you. [crosstalk]
Phil: How do you terminate that with the [?] board.
Pat: Pardon?
Greg: What’s the [?] board on?
Pat: That’s Dean Gerard’s house. He cut that in a sawmill. He lives on about 100 acres. [crosstalk] He has made his own plank in a sawmill. He built that house himself. It’s pretty cool.
Greg: Next is just getting into a little bit- some festival applications just to show you that again this is another project that Pat was involved on, and let you keep–[crosstalk]
Pat: This was up in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was interesting because of the ins and outs of the job. There was a lot of- it was rather intricate the way that they put this together and designed it. The thing that was really cool, and you can see we have staged shots of the job, the place– Can we go to the next slide? These were the BlackjackOne-steps. They pre-establish their height, they set their pitch, they had the pedestal set up, they had the grid. I like this because when they got to the outside edge, they showed the application where they put the anti-fracture membrane, they set a CMU unit, a concrete base per unit on the outside edge, and then they simply glued and applied it right to the phaser or the riser in the top for the outside edge, which was pretty much dictated by the height of the pedestal that they were putting in.
It was a very clean looking job, and they were done. Again, the process was interesting because they pretty much- they incorporated with those pedestals, with all the way down from the placement with the suction equipment, leveling, it was a very interesting job. Again, they’re utilizing the glass carrying suction cups to the larger pieces for setting, and that’s what it looked like when it was completed. It was a very interesting job.
Greg: Success residential [?]. Your experience is a lot of festivals, all types of those applications. Are they residential, commercial? What primarily was it?
Speaker 5: When I was installing, it was primarily residential.
Greg: Okay.
Pat: I know in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, a lot of times in the residential market. The pedestals are being applied residential to pre-existing concrete patios. I get two or three steps coming out back of the house. It’s 24 inch height or 18 inch height, instead of putting 45 tons of pressure against your foundation walls to your basement, now they can go in to eliminate that 45 tons of material, and the labor takes the place, and compact, and by simply selecting the right unit, and then when they’re applying the unit to the concrete and gluing it in place and so forth, it’s another whole market, other than just rooftop application with [?] .
Greg: Last is just to get you a quick little preview here on some permeable stuff. Again, we saw this downstairs but permeable are an application for this. The issue comes down to jointing and restrictions as far as loads for pedestals, we need drains underneath. If we are doing a pedestal job over an existing concrete, how are they draining that because the water is going to be going down in that bathtub that we created. There’re things here that we need to at the very least take a look at or consider.
This just showing a pretty standard cross-section, or some slabs on an aggregate base. Then this is just getting us a little bit more shot of an actual usage. Just what we saw down there, but this is out on a job site. The chip here, those eights or nines bet.
Pat: Eight.
Greg: Eight. So, a little bit larger aggregate. A number eight stone is typically about 3/8-inch top size stuff we have down in the arena that number nine stone which is about an eighth of an inch, or so top size. Just to give us an idea. With all that, and what we saw down there, and to get our juices flowing, and some good stuff like that, I think its ultimately time for us to get to work on this. Try to accomplish something. You guys want to do it, but let’s do it.
Steve: Do you want to go through– That was all presentations [?]
Greg: Is there anything else that we want to try to start as a group discussion? Before we get into actual agenda items.
Pat: Greg and I have discussed it. We kind of listed the installations, A through E, mortar and sand set, permeable engineered base, aggregate base, if there’s another application. Again, we were just trying to put something together that we could have a discussion as a group. Again, we’d like to go through each of these installation methods, and what we have downstairs, and we can go down and play with it. Again, go through each one to discuss do’s and don’ts as we see it.
Do’s and don’ts as we hear from our contractors. When you’re selling your job and you got a guy come in and he’s complaining and certain things are happening, but this is how we would like to approach it. If you see it different, or you think something would be better, certainly bring to the table. Any thoughts? Do you agree that this would be a good approach to look at this as a group, and we can take each individual application method. Even if you don’t understand it, you have questions about it, those questions will stimulate a nice conversation and discussion with talking about how it’s done. While we’re doing that, it may lead to other questions for that particular application.
Greg: The thought process was we start with 1A, and we try to solve 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D or 1A. Get through that. Go to 1B, and go through 2A, 2B, 2C, and see what we can come up with on this. Again, it seems like that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. From the notes, from everybody’s goals, but this is- I’m not going to say a meeting without direction. If nobody talks, it’s going to be a long one.
Steve: Just a reminder. Just say your name before speaking. [crosstalk] You can leave that. [laughs]
Giovanni: Giovanni here. To answer that question, I think that in terms of the installation methods that we went through is enough. I think that and I know Phil can shed a little light because he’s got experience out of where I don’t. He’s covered quite a bit what’s been going on today in the market in terms of installation from A to E in the installation method.
Pat: Pat McArdle. The only thing that I did see that we didn’t do that I think is probably a question is the sand set. Are we in agreement that we want to look at a sand set?
Greg: Sand set 2–[crosstalk]
Pat: Yes, which is B, which we’ll talk about sand set. We didn’t show it out there. Whether we’re going to screen an area and later on sand, that’s probably what we’ll end up doing on that right side. Just so we can cover up. I believe you do quite a bit of that. Right?
Steve: No, not really, but [?] though. There a lot of people that do.
Greg: Greg. Mike, I guess with the sand set, and we’re skipping ahead, I get that. It was one of the focus items for us. I don’t have issues with going to 1B and going from there. What would be a recommended bedding depth and a recommended bedding gradation for the materials? Does anybody have any questions, recommendations, comments?
Giovanni: Giovanni here. The question is with the sand sets that we had some talks about this before is we’ve seen a lot of failures outside of Florida, or even in Florida with the sand set installation. Most of the failures regardless of how they installed up north, I’ve got people calling me, so we did everything right. We have one inch of sand installed, and we have a problem of free stock. I wanted to know what you guys have to say about that because, of course, we won’t go deep into the conversation with them, or what’s underneath that balance sand.
There’s been a lot of people talking to me and asking me about on how we solve this problem. You know [?] on the freestyle areas. I would like to see what everybody’s opinions regarding that is. [crosstalk]
Speaker 5: [crosstalk] Real quick question here. We’re talking about sand set right now. 1B is sand set on concrete, then there’s 1E that’s aggregate based sand set. Are we talking about a particular one of those right now? I think I’m already–[crosstalk]
Giovanni: One aggregate, [crosstalk] aggregate base I think is what we’re talking about. Right? On the sand set?
Greg: Greg. Specifically, we’re talking about bedding, which I’m not sure that differs from concrete or aggregate. To comment, Giovanni, you mentioned that they’re saying that they’re doing it right putting down one inch of sand. Is one inch of sand right? That’s one of the things I think needed to be decided. Is it one inch of sand on aggregate, or half inch of sand on the concrete? Is it just a half inch of sand? The assumption is, the specification for segmental pavements applies to porcelain. I don’t know that it does. If we’re having failures in that installation method, then shouldn’t be two inches, should be happening. That would be my question. Do we know?
Steve: Steve Jobs. We know that when I started in the pavement business, the standard or the accepted standard was two inches of sand. That was never fun. Now as we evolve, we’re down to one inch. People tell me they try to almost do less and much less. I think if this has more to do with constructability than anything else, I think the thinner the bedding material that you have, forces you to do a much better job on your base prep.
There’s always that forgiveness in the bedding layer. I’m all for thinking about thinner bedding, because I would love to see contractors do a better job of base prep. By fitting this out to that half inch, you’ve got to be perfect on your base.
I think it’s a good discussion for me. Remember you’re getting– Maybe I don’t even know on the open-graded bedding material. The eight, nine- or nines that you’re kind of lost that you get during the compaction, eighth inch?
Pat: Pat McArdle. They’re not compacting majority, the contractors that are installing. Let’s face it. You originally in the interlocking market and pavers, that one of the main purposes aside from a leveling course was to assist in the interlock by compaction. By achieving density in the joint, by bringing it from the base up and the top down with mechanical compaction. Now, I’d say 50% of the installers of porcelain that are dry setting this, they’re not compacting it. They’re laying it and place their cabinet with a mallet and they’re moving on.
They’re scared to put a compaction equipment on it because they did number one, spend $3,000 to $5,000 on a roller kit. They don’t have it. Giovanni has a video that shows a plane camper with a moving blanket tied to it. That’s how they plate come back.
Greg: But at least it was our plate to go back. [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Pat: The thing is they’re improvising. They’re doing things, but the reality of it is on the two-centimeter paver, you’re not trying to achieve that– Let me rephrase that. The contractors are not even aware of the fact that they still need some type of density in that two-centimeter depth joint. Remember, with the segmental paver industry, if you take a putty knife, you have more than a quarter inch penetration into the joint, you don’t have the proper compaction and the joint will most likely fail. If you have more than a half inch loss of sand, you’re going to lose interlock.
Well, that’s not the case with porcelain. I think what we have to really discuss is compaction in that joint, how are they’re going to achieve the compaction in the joint? What are they going to put in the joint? Is it going to be a polymer material that’s going to go into the joint? Is it a grout material that goes into the joint? Those are all factors, whether it’s a two centimeter or three centimeter– I see with a three centimeter and four centimeter the thicker porcelains that are out there, compaction and achieving density, the joints a lot easier. Until it gets to that point, I think now what is it 80%, 85% of the market is two centimeters?
Greg: Yes.
Pat: I mean, it’s high. So, I think that’s where the concentration has to be put until we get over that hump.
Phil: Phil Grates here. Now one of the key things I think that you mentioned, Pat, is when you have the mechanical compaction before you sweep the joints and you start the process of interlock from the bottom side. As you know, there is no interlock with porcelain.
Pat: Correct.
Phil: That’s something that I think we have to get the language right here in this group because that’s going to take communication to the field because what I hear from the field, most contractors that install concrete pavers, they think it’s the same thing, which is not the same system. There is no vertical, no horizontal, or rotational interlock in a porcelain installation.
Speaker 7: Yes, [?] very important also to them to understand in the porcelain we are talking about quality is the same. I’m not talking about these technical specs that we know that are in the market material rectified and not rectified. When it is rectified, you have some problems with the joint. Ordinary problem with the joint. When it is not rectified, we have other problems. That means from my point of view, naturally defined material needs certain quantities of sand, rock, and joint. Not redefined material needs different quality of rock and joint and sand, because again, there is nothing come over because you know how it is made their job they’re not trying to get here. It is like on a clock.
Like this lay down doesn’t make anything control, and it comes down [?] before we understand what’s the point. If it’s 45 degrees, it is one [?]. You have a possibility to go up and down with the joint and with the sand or with diplomatic sand or whatever it was. If material is not rectified, it is another [?]
Pat: On a record, on a rectified piece of porcelain on a dry set, you’re saying that the possibility of making that joint a little larger would compensate, or no–[crosstalk]?
Speaker 7: I’m saying no. You understand what I’m saying? [crosstalk] This is an extreme. This is the material I would like to rectify. Of course, this is the material I’ll rectify. Sorry. [?] Almost rectify. If they are conjoined the dimension of the outer joint?] of course is going to be different, but this is, of course, could be larger because from the top. Even if it’s three millimeters in the top, it is going to be five, and the quality of the outer joint is more. And the same in this case, the outer joint, every possibility– So everything, again, because somebody told me, for example. Giovanni, if you remember correctly, you told me, “The [?] is working very well also because he’s going even under the material,” correct?
Giovanni: Yes, that’s what I’m advising everybody to do inside [?]
Speaker 7:I’d like to say in this kind of situation, with the spacers, we’ve been not redefining material the grout in joint or [?] more possibilities to work in one or two. In this case is less. We need to understand both from our side for certain kinds of occasion if it is better to suggest to the installer to buy the material. Not rectified or rectify. Maybe these are [?] joint, but for our side, it is very important because we can produce this way or this way. When we go on [?] 99% rectify material. If we are going in a [?] and aggregates outside [?] application could be this way or in this way. What do you think it is the best solution for your side? There isn’t a best solution from the tool, or it is the same?
Giovanni: Giovanni here. Contractors in Florida are the feedbacks that I can give, and that issue will be rectified and not rectified. A couple of problems that I’ve seen in job sites that I got quoted that I visited, [?] failing on a lot of jobs. When they’re using- and we didn’t discuss this, Pat, I forgot to bring that out. When they were using the bigger disks [crosstalk].
Pat: [?]
Giovanni: It’s coming out, literally–[crosstalk]
Greg: Yes. [crosstalk] a bunch of pictures in the beginning.
Giovanni: They come out after a while with little and pieces here and there. It’s not a complete failure, but an area for the failures. We tried to solve that problem. We went and looked at what’s causing it, if they’re not compacting, are they compacting, we talked about it. Are they welding it properly? What type of polymeric sand that they’re using? There’re all these types of things, but looking at a job where the polymeric sand, the proper polymeric sand was used. We went and looked at the fact that it wasn’t mean- it wasn’t installed properly. With the disk’s underneath, they cannot go all the way under.
It was just sitting on top of that disk, now you have that disk sitting on the [?] . That wasn’t coming in on rectified products. The un-rectified products, similar problems, but even bigger because now spacer are pretty big. There were a lot of movements of the material over time, because of the bigger joint of the un-rectified. Those are the things that we saw. A recommendation came out for the Florida market, for the South Florida market, that as a distributor we are putting out there, the rectified product with a spacer that allows you to get that sand underneath spatially comes from the top, so that doesn’t have the disk. It’s been used now for about eight months to nine months, and there has been no failure on that so far.
They’re also vibrating a little bit of the two [?], and they’re using the proper course, the proper [?] sand. In my humble opinion, the rectified product is going to give less problems on the installation point if they are un-rectified. Unless again, if you might say now we’re talking about driving here, and we went off-topic I think a little bit because we’re talking about the sand. That’s the experience that I can tell you with what we do to answer your question out there. As my personal opinion on rectified [?] drive an installation, work better with the proper [?]
Greg: Greg. So, with the failures that you were seeing, we’re saying the pads, okay the disks in the corners, even though they’re only covering maybe two inches of that joint. On a 24-inch unit, you still have 20 inches of joint where it can get under it. Two inches on the corners is what was causing failures.
Giovanni: There were a lot of [?] in those corners. I don’t know if it’s because the [?] wasn’t in there, [?] was not adhering in those sections. That’s where the most failures happen and right on the corners, they were coming out. That’s what we saw. That’s the only conclusion we had. It’s not like he was failing it completely. There were areas that were coming up, and I would say 95% of the areas coming up were on the corners on where the four corners meet. Again, I might be wrong, but that did not happen anymore once it was installed properly with the spacer is coming from the top and not underneath. Again, that would rectify.
Phil: What was the base, the base on that–[crosstalk]?
Giovanni: Just sand base.
Greg: My thoughts–[crosstalk]
Giovanni: Bedding sands and the base four inches of lime rock. That’s what they use down there.
Greg: My opinion of that would be that it’s the rubber spacer that’s not allowing the jointing sand to cure.
I mean, Phil, you have much more knowledge on that than I would but–
Phil: The rubber spacer?
Giovanni: The plastic–[crosstalk]
Greg: The plastic pedestal that you were putting it on isn’t allowing the jointing sand in those corners to cure.
Phil: To dehydrate. [crosstalk]
Greg: It’s not a jointing sand issue, like you were saying, it’s a spacer issue. Potentially, it’s not the jointing sand going underneath that was helping it.
Pat: Are you talk about with those clear spacers?
Giovanni: Yes, the clear spacers [?] both down there. The spacer that I brought to show everybody that comes from the top. And I’m going to say that they’re not failing. There was a couple of failures here and there, and we can look at it as a [?]. But a larger percentage worked. We are here thinking I’m picking this up, and because I went to see a contractor was picking up an area. And literally when he picked up the area, we could see the poly underneath and glued together to pieces are coming up.
That’s my take on it from seeing it. That the reason that there’s nothing underneath the [?] with a vibrating went in and put everything together. It’s a guess at this time. There was no really deep research into it. What I can say is that the rectified product with the proper insulation and the proper quality with poly sand, with the spacers coming from the top, we’re failing a lot less. We [?] probably limited value versus the ones that have the disk [?]. That is what we have seen in- down there.
Phil: [crosstalk] corner of the drain. There are other types. Maybe–[crosstalk]
Speaker 5:[?] the water to drink.
Greg: Phil, what is your take on that?
Phil: I don’t know yet, honestly. Most of the installations that we have done so far are either bonded on concrete, or we’ve got applications. That’s all got get into the exteriors game late in the season, right, and we didn’t have really much product until June [?] until November. It was mostly just turning jobs in respect to something else, or winning specs on commercial work for bonded on concrete applications for outdoor. I should know a lot more than the next six months or so. Now that we’re in the game at the beginning of the season. But I don’t know that– When you’re talking about basically [?] aggregated with the same setting base, is that on the same bed?
No more than an inch. In a lot of parts of the country, and Jose can certainly backup on this. It’s turning more and more, and I’m sure you guys came to more and more to the hybrid style or the permeable style base. [crosstalk]
Greg: I think that that’s how you should be.
Phil: I tend to think so too. Now [?] Steve certainly knows this. Some parts of the country, it’s almost impossible to get to the right bedding stuff.
Pat: Right gradation, right bedding the sand.
Phil: So that makes it very difficult. We have to be able to say, well, you can’t get that. Here’s the backup way to do it on a [?] aggregated.
Speaker 7: Just going to speak with this part of the table. As we have for standard ties or the standard materials, where we have for all the kind of application or part of the houses, the specs, so and so. Talking about tiles for our showrooms, or showers, or bathrooms, or kitchen, or plaza. For all these kinds of applications, we are specs [?]. There is the possibility from your side of your part of the table to have these kinds of systems may be to match your necessity. If I know, for example, this is the situation sand bedding or certain kind [?] in social. We need to understand, is it correct to [?] when we say that’s all.
Let me know which way do you want to store the material, or what the market needs in terms of installation of the material, and then we see from our side which kind of facts we can give to you, or which kind of [?] we can give to you in the material. Because I said before, now we rectify the material in a certain way because it is the same system as we were. We rectify the material for your application. But if we need to rectify differently new material for outdoor application because there is certain particular kind of needs, we can. For example, water. You mentioned to me water.
When we are defining material, it’s actually 45 degrees. We create in the [?] with our edge of the material right there like a glass. You don’t see, but there is a frame, and this kind of frame is the one is containing the water inside the [?]. When we went into the market and we understand your performance, we start to rectify differently the edge of the material compared to what we used to look for inside, because the water needs to go out also. And depending with [?] it is worked differently. This is just an example. But again, according to the necessity or the prescription you asked us, maybe we are able to provide you something better in terms of the application material, type of [?], leverage, so we can– We have rooms to work on it. Because again, talking about the ones that maybe make too much confusion in the conversation. But when we spoke with a lot of installer, and they are saying tiles or porcelain are more fragile [?] with the cement because they rectify material even if it is direct, it is going to be shipping easily than the concrete.
Especially if I’m going on top within [?]. Technology speaking, if we understand which way, we only store the material, according to locally is the necessity in Florida, New Jersey or Canada. Maybe we can we can understand better what we have to do for our side. What do you think, Marino?
Ryan: Ryan Marino. I guess what I’m trying to process right now is you’re using methods and materials that are proven in a different industry, right? The use of polymeric sand works for brick pavers, it works for concrete pavers. One of the challenges with porcelain, but one of the benefits, but also one of the challenges is its lack of water absorption. It has a very low water absorption, which means that when a material is wet and is in contact with it, if that material is relying on the material around it to absorb that moisture, it’s not going to happen. ThatR#8217;s why when we’re setting porcelains with thin sets, you typically use a polymer modified thin set rather than a standard type thin set. The polymer within that thin set allows it to dehydrate without the moisture mitigation, without the movement of the moisture. It’s an internal type set.
Steve: It doesn’t dehydrate [crosstalk]?
Ryan: Yes. The way it works is simply different because that moisture isn’t being absorbed by the material. I’m not very familiar with polymeric sand, but it’s possible that it’s just not the right product to be installed in conjunction with this, or it needs something else, and that’s where I’m not sure if that product exists today. There’s potentially needs to be a product that acts as polymeric sand for porcelain pavers that is able to work in conjunction with porcelain pavers.
Greg: Greg. When material is rectified, I’ve noticed the edges of it are smooth. Smooth as glass, okay. Is there a way to not make that smooth?
Giovanni: Giovanni here. To answer your question, a lot of fails– Again I’m speaking with [?] being that we also do the manufacture of the products that are being put out here. I noticed about a year ago, a little bit less than a year ago, I noticed that one of the biggest reasons for that besides not having the proper poly sand, the edges were smooth on the porcelain. We as an industry and the hardscape industry, the poly sand is the only thing available, right? Other than the grout and a couple of the things that are out there, poly sand is what we can use.
What we did as a manufacturer in Italy, I went up and I say, “Guys, when you’re rectifying this product, do not polish after. Leave your salt marks on the side of my porcelain that you guys are sending out to us, to distribute in the US.” I said I think that by leaving those salt marks on the side, we create a binding agent to the polymeric sand. For about six months now, seven months now, we’ve been doing for that for the 2 and the 3 cm, and it’s working. When we see a failure it’s not because it’s not binding it, we literally are picking up full pieces of a 16 by 32 and bringing it up glued to the cut piece that is right next to it on a 3 cm that is pretty heavy. Of course, you got a thicker on the 3 cm, it’s easier.
You put more polymerics in. That’s happening on the two as well. For us so far, that’s the answer that we found to be able to make it work if the install is done properly, the proper polymeric sand is put, and there’s got to be something with those cuts on the side that we leave those marks in there, it is binding. For us, it’s working. We see the contractor really liking that because we might have solved a problem. [crosstalk]
Steve: Steve here. Allowing the friction of the unpolished edge to provide that, it’s like when you’re scuffing something up to get something to bond to that.
Giovanni: You have your- your cut marks out there, right? That’s basically what the solution that I came up with for the factory and said, “Listen, do that, and let’s make that try.” Again, this is something that we’re doing in a different location and I know–[crosstalk]
Steve: Florida.
Giovanni: Yes. But listen, the products from [?] now will have been shipped to other states. We have shipped to Texas; the factory has shipped to other areas where they’ve installed it and they also- the poly didn’t fail so far. That might be something to consider. And I don’t know, Phil, what’s your experience with that?
Phil: Phil here. Experience on it is relatively limited, although when I was still with Techno seal, we manufactured polymeric sand. We had several claims of failure for various porcelain producers. My opinion on it is that that’s going to continue just because of different polymeric sands, different installation techniques, different movement conditions in different parts of the country. As an industry, I would rather not try to solve the issue with my product. I would rather try to solve it with the joint material. Because at the end of the day, the joint it comprises almost none of the installation, right? It’s very narrow, and it’s very shallow. You’re putting hardly any product in the joint basically, and yet that’s the source of vast majority of the headaches on the jobs.
Ryan: Ryan Marino here. On the installations you’re doing, are any of the joints some type of compressible material that allows for expansion and contraction?
Giovanni: We’re strictly using our– We’re not, I’m not installing, but what we see the contractors doing out again in Florida is only polymeric sand. A lot of the grouting is going on as well on the mud set jobs. On the dry set jobs, because of the weather and climate that we have out there, there’s no movement to it. We found a couple grouts that are working, but those are the only two items that we’re working with right now. If we can find something that works for all of it, it would be great. But there’s always that option that if we don’t, and I’m replying more to what you had asked, if you can do whatever you can do with the product and if the manufacturers can do what they can do with the product, it’s a simple process if you understand how the material is made.
Once it rectified just let it go, once it’s cut. That could be an answer why we don’t have a product that we can put in there and work with. We don’t care with the polish, we deal with polish whatever it is that we use.
Don: Don here. Does the polymeric sand have an elastic component, or is it rigid?
Steve: It’s very little. There’s a small degree of flexibility. Very small.
Don: More flexible than elastic then. Did you want to split some hairs on language?
Steve: Yes, it’s not elastic.
Don: Okay. Not all the failures make it back to us certainly, but the ones that we’ve seen are generally dramatic sub grade failure where what was below the tile went away. And at some point, then the tile failed. In terms of these more technical failures of the joint compound, those things have not made it back to us. This is the first I’m hearing a lot of that. The ones I had were, the tile broke because there was nothing under it, sorry.
Pat: Pat, here. Again, you’re thinking about whether you’re on a dense graded aggregate base or a concrete base and you’re doing a sand set. If you remember again in the paver industry, it was 5% absorption rate and very, 3% to 5% only went through the joints. The joints are basically there with a chamfered edge, they channel water. While in the porcelain because there is no porosity at all, basically .001 or .003. It’s so low. The water goes to the joint. Regardless of the size of the joint, if I have sand underneath, eventually there’s a saturation point, especially if you’re on a concrete base and there’s no loopholes. Even on a DGA base, a dense graded aggregate that’s 95%-98% dense, you’re not getting penetration. You’re getting saturation of that sand. The reason why you’re having deflection in the corners is because once that sand gets wet, and any type of even foot traffic or pedestrian traffic causes the deflection in the corners and you get lippage. It’s weeping up through the joint.
Most polymeric sands need the ability as they hydrate, they have to dehydrate. If they can’t dehydrate, the polymers detach, and six to eight months down the line, it’s sand. Now you have sand in the joint, sand underneath, and the water not standing on the porcelain because you have at least minimally 2% to 4% pitch anyway when you do your installation because that’s basically what we’re taught when you’re pitching to get water to go off. The water that’s going to the joints is causing that sand to come to get to a saturation point and it weeps. I know that the contractors that I’ve spoken to in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, even in British Columbia, up in Canada, I have two in particular, Phil and this guy Johnny Mack, they do 10s of thousands of square feet of porcelain installs.
They had probably half dozen different litigations where they were suing manufacturers because they were recommending sand set. These are jobs that are five, six, seven thousand square feet. It’s not the manufacturer’s fault. In my opinion, I don’t really think the porcelain should set on the sand. I think that there’s too many issues. There are too many factors there. There are too many things that are going to go wrong. There’s the gradation of the sand. You look at the picture of sand in Florida, it looks like number eight stuff. Their sand is so course, and you look at the standards, 200 sieves, less 1% to 3% that goes through a 200 sieve, you’re not going to maintain water, you’re not going to have any deformation or expansion or contraction with resolve because the fines aren’t in. They don’t care.
There are parts of Pennsylvania, they have stone quarries, but they don’t have sand, they’re using stone dust. There’re too many regulations when you do– I’m okay with the dry pack, with a certain percentage of a binding agent, whether it’s a three to one or four to one, and again the application will dictate what that dry pack will need to stabilize the base. I’m okay with that. But I’m not okay with sand set. I think that as a council and looking at it and knowing that most of the issues that we’ve seen have been sand set. Looking at a solution for that whether it’s a dry pack sand set like most tile setters do indoors, can it be applied outdoors and what do you have to do to modify it to make it work? I think that’s the direction we need to go when you’re looking at that market.
Ryan: I’m looking something up here. I think what you call a dry pack, we would call a mortar bed but I’m just-[crosstalk]
Pat: Basically, yes.
Phil: Yes. That’s what I was going to ask. How do you-
Greg: Dry pack is damp. Water would be wet consistence.
Pat:Typically, most sandy given box going to have 3% to 5% moisture in it anyway and typically you’re not adding.
Ryan: A mortar bed mix for floors is typically one-part cement, five parts sand mixed to a dry pack consistency. That’s for a mortar bed. You would in instances where you’re wanting to build up to substrate or you’re maybe not bonding directly to concrete, you may do a mortar bed. Mortar beds are also common in things like showers where you’re trying to build in some amount of slope.
Greg: What would the gradation of that sand be? Were they recommending Mason sand for that, or they were recommending concrete sand?
Ryan:Masonry cement and-[crosstalk]
Pat: Which is high strength.
Ryan: They don’t call out specifically.
Pat: That’s five to one. Now for exterior applications in Florida, they’re doing three to one, so it’s going to be a little richer. They’re adding the less sand, the more mortar. They’re compensating by making that dry pack a little stronger. My point to that is, in certain specifications, say if you’re doing a dry pack on a preexisting concrete bed for a driveway, you may have a higher water content in that dry pack to set it.
Steve: You’re talking about going over an existing slab?
Pat: You could.
Giovanni:[?] I think that that would work only the completely wet set but not a dry pack on top of [?]
Greg: Dry pack over aggregate.
Giovanni: Would you 2 cm on the driveway? I personally wouldn’t advise that.
Phil: Over concrete slab we’ve already got in the industry. We’ve already got the cross section in the details for how to do that.
Giovanni: F101 through F104 or something like that?
Ryan: Yes. That’s what I’m looking at now. F101 is on ground concrete bonded mortar bed.
Greg: Those tile specifications transfer to porcelain, no issues?
Giovanni: Right. That includes porcelain tile and that’s specifically for exterior.
Pat: Yes, and you just have to make sure on those materials that you’re using in that case that are rated suitably for outdoor depending on what kind of climate you’re in.
Greg: That’s not anything that we need to deal with?
Pat: No. The bond on concrete that they’ve already[crosstalk]
Greg: We’re all good with the standard that’s been set?
Ryan: Right. Yes, I think the big issue for this group is going over some type of aggregate that is loose or–
Greg: Flexible installations?
Ryan:Yes some type of flexible that works for these other paving systems, and certainly can work for porcelain as well. But the experience needs to show what needs to change because again, these aren’t three by five or five by eight or three by eight brick pavers. These are two foot by two-foot porcelain pavers that are a lot thinner.
Giovanni: Giovanni here, do we know– There’s a lot of porcelain being sold all over the country. Is the percentage of failure comparing to the percentage that has been successful because there’s a lot of material being installed? Again, I can only speak for what’s being done in Florida. There’s a lot of success with the sands and installing. Again, Florida different animal, different– The failures most of the time when looked at are something to do with a bad install or somebody not putting a space or wetting the polythene too much. How do we figure it out? What’s the percentage of failure and what is the biggest issue?
You already brought some of those out because you’ve seen it. Comparing to the amount of material that’s been put out in the market today, is there any way that we can help you to figure it out? What’s the percentage of failure on that? Is it considerably and what is the biggest failure?
Greg: Let me suggest we take a 15-minute break. Bathroom stop, refreshments, that kind of stuff. We’ll come back here in 15 minutes. Okay. All right. Great.
[background conversation]
Giovanni: I think we’ll get started. You ready for it? We had a little bit of discussion [?] during the break. I think it’s probably a pretty good conclusion that the tile for the wet set, standards are there. The most discussions that we had at this point is probably with the dry applications. Your aggregate bedding whether it be sand or limestone over [?] Truly flexible installation because that’s going to, I think deal with jointing material, add restraints and the bend itself.
Ryan: Sand over open graded aggregate too, right?
Giovanni: Well, yes. I think that will ultimately be the next one once we come to some conclusions. I think that’s the next that we tackle also. Some of the things that I think were left, they were brought up, but no general consensus is the materials and the thickness. The bedding material specifically and the thickness of that bedding material. [?] and thickness on bedding material are probably two things that we need to deal with to set a standard on it or to come to a conclusion on. I don’t know that the height of us, nine of us, whatever, 10, speak for the industry but we can only base it out of what we know.
Phil: Phil here. Based on what we know and why the material complexion and the depth of existing base material for concrete pavers for instance, is there any reason why we couldn’t use that as our base line standard for porcelain. Any reason why it would be different?
Giovanni: I don’t think so. We’ll open that up to everybody else [?]
Ryan: I agree with–That’s what I’ve been telling everybody, why would that not work if we deal with the rest of the issues of the joints and the poly sand and so forth.
Phil: Getting on up. Getting material on up, right?
Giovanni: Yes, by that you mean the base is-
Phil:[?] base.
Giovanni: It is what it is. The depth and the material.
Phil:[?]
Giovanni: Right. Giovanni here. That’s what’s been used by all contractors all over the state of Florida. It’s apart from the failures that we talked about in the poly sand and the applications. That’s what they’re doing. It’s working.
Steve: Greg. Is it possible that the poly sand failures are coming from over wetting? Because the porcelain has such a low absorption, because the joints are such a small amount of the large format material. Again, is it an issue where it’s I don’t want to say bad installer but installers that just don’t know how to do it. I know that poly sands have been created for porcelains, somebody’s done that, correct?
Giovanni: Put a leg on anyone.
Phil: Yes.
Speaker 5: The secret for porcelain pavers.
Ryan: This is Ryan. That’s one of the things I’d like to check when I get back to the office. It’s just to reach out to some of the contacts I have in the [?] mortar industry to see what’s available and what they’re recommending. If you were to call a major [?] mortar manufacturer tomorrow when I ask how to install this and what product to use. I’d like to get from them what they’re recommending and then-
Phil: You were in the sand business for 13 years. What was your recommendation because you were still involved with [?] and porcelain was there? How do you feel about some of the products that- that particular manufacturer had?
Ryan: Steve, would you turn off the recording for a second?
[laughter]
Only joking. 100% transparency here, I never wanted to be in the porcelain jointing game as a polymeric sand manufacturer. Never wanted to because it was $25 bag every 250 square feet and if it’s going to have problems, that’s just a lot of problems for zero sales. I always wanted to be in the natural stone, deep joints, wide joints, a lot of material over a small amount of area. My opinion is and there’s always subject to change as innovation’s happening in the industry, but this isn’t opinion, this is fact. Polymeric sand is a material for which there is no standard, there’s no ASTM standard for polymeric sand.
Giovanni: That was also my next thing.
Ryan: You can have a teaspoon full of additive in the bag or you can have a cup full of additive in the bag.
Phil: The additives they vary.
Ryan: Again, what’s the additive? Who knows? Everybody’s got their own little secret sauce to get through stuff. It’s supposed to be blinders in there [?] but it really, to me, goes back to what I said earlier when Giovanni and I were talking about polymeric sand is, I don’t think that in the long run until there’s a significant product step forward or improvement innovation, I don’t think that polymeric sand, any of them, in their current state are really a long-term solution for joint and porcelain and in fact, our industry partner, Mapei, who by the way, my guess would be they’re going to tell you they bought enough concrete and [?] but our industry partner, Mapei, their senior architectural director calls polymeric sand a sacrificial ground, meaning that you’re going to have to maintain that ground over time. Is it acceptable? Yes, but you have to accept as the owner of the project that it’s going to come out.
Giovanni: Is that joint filler an integral part of the installation? If I do or do not put it in the joint, is that installation going to fall apart?
Ryan: This is the part of the conversation I’m probably most interested in [?] the whole day. [crosstalk]
Steve: Steve here, is it a structural component? Because of the thickness probably I’m going to say no.
Speaker 5: Will that project with the 18 by 18 or a two by two or two by three or two by four–There probably is a minimal size that you can lay freely without any joint material that wouldn’t have failure but I think if you get down below an 18 by 18, there may be some movement depending on the application, what it’s being used for.
Ryan: Because of the size and weight of the unit.
Speaker 5: Yes, I think the size, the weight of the unit and the spacer is because every porcelain job regardless of how it’s laid, requires a spacer whether it’s a top spacer or a bottom spacer.
Steve: Unless you’re laying in an application where it’s more like a steppingstone where you gap the things out three inches because you want to have that beautiful looking aggregate.
Speaker 5: That’s the only reason why you wouldn’t have the spacer, is the steppingstone.
Steve:[?] Spacers are to make sure they’re not touching.
Speaker 5: Correct.
Giovanni: Giovanni here, question, would a 16th of an inch space between these now diminishing, making them smaller, open space for sand, whatever, on a dry lay, what are your thoughts on that and [crosstalk]
Phil: I think 4 mm is probably the minimal I would go, I wouldn’t go to 16th just for the fact that there’s too many issues that you would have.
Giovanni: What’s 16th in mils, what’s that converted [crosstalk]
Steve: About 2 mm.
Speaker 5: It’s 2 mm and it’s quite small.
Steve: It is.
? Jose: I wouldn’t recommend it; I think 4 mils is the least I would do.
Phil: When we get a little bit deeper into this, I’ve got a product that probably some others have seen that’s a 3 mills spacer and it’s used blindly in other markets, in Canada especially. 3 mil apparently is okay.
Steve: That one down there is a 4 mil.
Phil: Yes, absolutely. Thank you. 3 mil is what’s being used the most, I was just wondering on the 16th of an inch for– Since we think when we’re talking about the polymerics and not working. [?]
Ryan: Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize, most polymeric sand that’s on the market is designed for an eighth-inch and the reason why 85% of the sands produced work is because they’re plate compacted and it crushes it and change the angularity and it goes in through the joint. There’s only two sands on the market that will go into a joint without compaction that I know and one of them we know [unintelligible 02:15:15] but he’s really not in the ballgame anymore, it’s like dump a Metamucil in your trunk but it’s–for the most part.
Steve: Real quick, Phil here again. On the pedestal that we’re bringing to market, the profilitech, they’ve got interchangeable heads on it but one of them is a two-mil spacer actually. 2 mil is half of that.
Ryan: For rooftop applications?
Steve: Yes.
Ryan: Which don’t require jointing. [crosstalk] sure, that makes sense.
Steve: No jointing, no polymeric sand, dry lay, a 2-mil spacer is a no, no because a polymeric is not going to go into that [?] [crosstalk]
Phil: Phil here, my issue with that and what everyone’s going to say is the joints are going to fill up the junk and you’re going to get weak and whatever.
Steve: We do that with paver sand so it wouldn’t be any different than what the material that is on the market today, pavers, travertine, they get the weeds, they got whatever going growing in there. We’re trying to be better of course but if you’re going to be just like every other product when it comes to the joint and that it’s going to work, I’m just wondering, why wouldn’t it work with the 2 mil? What would be the concerns with you guys that are professional on that? With the two-mil closing with the sand just [crosstalk] No joint, no polymerics in because it wouldn’t work anyway. It’s not working [?]
Giovanni: What are you doing with the water then?
Steve: That is my question. Is that going to be a problem? [?] We’re making very small; we’re putting our fine set in between like we do our pavers but now we’re only using a 16th of an inch spacer. What are your thoughts? That’s just [crosstalk]
Phil: I think if they’re having trouble jointing an eighth-inch joint, they’re going to have more trouble trying to join the 16th-
Steve: We don’t want a joint, [crosstalk].
Phil: No jointing then when you accept that, what are you doing with the water because at first you said the 16th of inch joint in-
Steve: No joint, sorry.
Phil: What are you doing with water? Now we’re talking porcelains are only permeable.
Steve Johns: Steve Johns here, you have to do something with the water. You’ve got to get it off the paver not through the paver. By going to a 16th of an inch I think that’s not acceptable. I too was in the joint sand business early on both with polymers and with the organic stuff and all of those failed. They are not durable materials so that’s one of the reasons why we got out, there was never a permanent solution. These were all temp in my opinion. Even though I was the one selling them, they were all temporary solutions.
Phil: Sacrificial.
Giovanni: [crosstalk] You go ahead.
Speaker 5: Ryan here, this strays away a little bit from where the conversation is but it’s relevant because the thickness of the joint is also going to be dictated by the variants [?] dimensions of these products so a non-rectified product is not going to have finished edges which means it’s going to have more variation likely than a rectified product and even a rectified product will have some variation. I’m not sure that the manufacturers in this room would necessarily recommend a 16th-inch joint even in a bonded grouted application just because of facial size.
Ryan: That’s fair enough.
Phil: [crosstalk] rectified,
Ryan: That clears that up.
Speaker 5:Yes, because I think what you would end up with is potential issues with alignment of grout joints.
Ryan: Greg, is there a grout out there that can be used in a flexible application? We’re talking about how rigid poly sands are. Why not use a flexible grout instead?
Speaker 5: It’s entirely possible. Other than porcelain pavers ones, one of the other products we’re starting to see develop in the marketplaces is floating tile installations even for interiors and those all have grout integrated as well. I’m sure that there are products either available now or that will become available. I think the question [?] maybe come down to cost. What does that grouting add to the installation because again I’m not terribly familiar with how much is involved in using [?] saying but it sounds like maybe it’s a little bit quicker than if you’re down on your hands and knees, grouting five thousand square feet of the driveway? I think that —
Ryan: I would say four or five times [?]
Speaker 5: I think we have more money involved in the material and you’re going to have more money involved in the labor. At the end of the day, you’re getting a better product. Portland’s going to last longer. There are a lot of benefits but it’s an up sell.
Phil: A flexible grout. Giovanni here. Flexible grout and I’ve been asking [?] for a while now and every time we go to shows and explaining to them what the issues are with the dry lay with porcelain. Spoke with a few people, spoke with them out of the country and inside the country in Italy and so far, they couldn’t suggest anything after they understand, what is it that we’re facing when we stay [?].
Steve: Greg, I guess my question is, what are they doing in Italy? In mature markets? How are they jointing these dry [?] applications?
Phil:[?] and then a lot of mud setting goes on in Italy. [crosstalk] and everything there is–
Ryan: They’re saying 95% that is cement.
Phil:[?] Germany and Netherlands they’re doing a lot more of the dry lake right now and they’re using a lot of [?]
Ryan: The problem is there are no money. There is not enough money for the players to develop this kind of industry or solution. All the time when I speak with Mapei or people related to Mapei they’re saying why I spend money [unintelligible 02:22:25] money inside the bag. All the trouble is coming to me and then I [?] wanting to justify the investments. Again, a lot of installer they prefer to use just the cement grout [?] standard grouting cement. Of course, takes more time but it’s going to be dusted and ugly, so they had to clean it properly, but this is what they do.
Phil: Phil here. In Great Britain, I know they’re doing a lot of mud set and they’re using that easy joint from Azpects? for jointing and I don’t think anybody in here has any real experience with that product.
? Speaker: They wanted to be [?].
Speaker 5: I know Jeff wanted to be here.
Phil: Jeff, him and I, it was just a decision back then just so like I was difficult with PCNA. We wanted to keep this to be a small meeting so we could get more form to it before we opened it up. It would have probably been a good choice to have them be here just to speak to their experience.
Ryan: Azpec?t.
Speaker 5: Easy joint azpect?, whatever it’s a larger joint and it’s permeable.
Phil: Yes, but not flexible.
Giovanni: They have an easy joint to or something as well. It’s not permeable
Phil: Got you.
Giovanni: I believe still wet sweeping. Just to put in [?] for the concrete industry, for the for-cement type would work wonderful, for the dry lay it would not because we had this conversation with Jeff like three hours meeting with him at the show. We hope– we came to the conclusion. They came to the conclusion; you cannot do this on a dry lay. It’s not going to work. It’s not flexible. That came from Jeff it’s [?].
Phil: Permeable systems are flexible
Giovanni: His products won’t work; you need more than an eighth of an inch. First of all, he said that 2cm, it’s only three quarters said that’s not only it’s not [?] he’s not going to advise and if it’s not quarter of an inch or bigger, he said that he would not advise for it.
Phil: He is advising for it in concrete pavers?
Ryan: Well he is.
Steve: It’s allowed?
Ryan: One reason that we–
Steve: They’re advising to use it in permeable paver applications which are flexible. They’re allowed. They’re advising to use it as a pervious joint in wet set, which just introduces water down to the mortar bed
Phil: Which we don’t.
Steve: Correct. Neither of those things seem to make sense to me. Not that I would ask for clarification, but [crosstalk]
Phil: He’s not here to present for himself.
Steve: I think that’s a–You see what I’m saying though?
Phil: Absolutely.
? Jose: Jose here, from Chicago, most of our yards are probably between 4-600 square feet. Getting water out of the backyard is the hardest part. You either have a drainage system, put everything towards the draining or you throw it to your neighbors. Hopefully, they won’t get pissed off at you.
Steve: You would throw it to your neighbors?
[laughter]
It’s all you could do
[laughter]
[?]
? Jose: Exactly, so every installation I’ve ever done, and every installation I recommend on, I always do open-graded base installs on the red porcelain. That’s what I recommend. I’ve never recommended sand set. Personally, I’ve tried it and it’s always failed. I use a thinner spacer of that. It’s usually liked a millimeter’s thick spacer not really [?] it’s like a [?]
Ryan: That’s a four millimeter [?] the thickness.
? Jose: The thickness of it, I always recommend a thinner one and a thicker joint. Quarter-inch joint on the top. In Chicago, we’ve used poly sand and it’s always failed. Even those that have a label on or that say porcelain tile, it’s always failed. It’s the only product that has actually helped us and work for us has been a product from your– I call the Easy Pro. We kind of tuck pointed in, it’s a little bit more work, but we tuck-pointed it in, and it’s worked great. It’s the most long-lasting product we’ve had out there.
What’s the name again?
? Jose: Easy pro.
Phil: Easy pro, which is ramparts, which [?] [crosstalk]
Ryan: Easy joint.
Phil: Yes, that’s the same thing. Over-pervious system or pervious system, open graded base, open-graded bedding, wide joints with a permeable.
Ryan: If you got a quarter-inch joint why not just sweep number eight stone in there?
? Jose: It’s just that you’re always going get a little bit of movement on the bottom and quarter inch just gravel in between, it’s just going to start chipping the tiles. We always recommend something a little finer. You know our claims our product is permeable. It is the filtration. The infiltration level was not there but it will absorb some of the water down. I know, azpects their product is way more permeable. I still personally haven’t tried that one on the product but I’m assuming it’s going to work this just as well as the Easy Pro.
Ryan: Curious to see that experimented with.
Steve: We actually did that where we took several pieces, put the Easy Pro in it, let it dry for 48 hours. Then I picked it up and I could actually hold two pieces that were held together by the Easy pro.
Ryan: Two pieces of what?
Steve: Porcelain. [?] Well, so it did it here to the sides and it was rectified. I have several dealers that sell our sealers that actually they’re promoting Easy Pro as working very well with–
Ryan: Easy pro or easy joint? [?] easy pro?
Steve: Yes.
Ryan:Okay. [?]
Steve: Yes.
Phil: Greg, this is Don. You mentioned earlier the permeable pavement. It sounded like we want to bring some of those techniques to this audience installation with open Greg with material below, geotextile will be protected and pervious tile on top, manage the water vertically and horizontally.
Steve: We’re both in agreement on that. I agree with that also.
Phil: I can go right there. That’s from my side, that’s the cleanest solution. It solves it in all directions in managing the water.
Steve: I was apparently incapable of multitasking. I was taking a note I missed the first part of what you said
Phil: Take the mindset of permeable pavement. Let the water pass through, let the water runoff. I don’t care where the water goes and long as it goes. I’m an old civil engineer, I had a transportation instructor, he said there are three important things about highway design, drainage, drainage, and drainage. This is taken care of it in X, Y and Z [?] I like it.
Steve: Greg, my opinion for this type of product, it’s probably the most forgiving installation. Open-graded aggregates for bass, stick to the same six inches that’s recommended by ICPI, open-graded bedding, number eights, number nines, spacers to give you a wide enough joint to allow for x, what do you want to put in the joints? Granite chips or easy joint whatever. Even if you go with something like a poly sand like the one demonstration area we have down there, I think that would even work because you are allowing that, the joint to dehydrate. Potentially, yes, I think that is the cure all to some degree.
Ryan: Phil. What other option? What do you think about a low pedestal over permeable on jointed?
Phil: I don’t think the stability is there from the pedestal itself. You’re going to have issues with-
Ryan: Low pedestal, like half inch.
Steve: Regardless, it’s the footprint. Whether it’s 12 inches tall or half inch tall, the footprint that’s bearing the weight is the same.
Giovanni:Yes, unless you’re on a 12 by 12.
Ryan: What stability issue are you talking about?
Phil: If you have a pedestal with roughly four to six inches, okay and I’m setting that on a three quarter or 57 clean stone, there’s only a certain amount of density you’re going to get with that clean stone. Any downward pressure, if I’m taking four pieces of porcelain on one pedestal, I’m increasing the payload per square inch that I’m putting on the base of that pedestal. The possibility for movement is greatly increased in that footprint on the base of the pedal where it touches the aggregate. I would be concerned about even in a pedestrian application, a 250-pound person standing on that joint is going to put pressure where it meets that stone.
Steve: I would think even that same person walking across that joint is going to create potentially movement within them, that’s more that vibration that’s required to consolidate the 57s underneath.
Phil: Interestingly enough, we have some low profile, why don’t we do it? [crosstalk] That’s why we’re here.
Speaker 5: I think we have to take a look at it because I think that it is being done out there in some cases in some markets.
Steve: We can set it up because we have the screeds that are there, we have the vacuum equipment. These are the things that we’re out there to do. That’s what we want to do. One of the things, what you’re saying when you use a low profile, like in Chicago, you’re saying you use that low profile spacer, when you put the joint material in that, I did two different scenarios on the engineered base, the un-engineered base on a clean with fabric and without fabric. Just by putting that piece of permeable fabric on the one side, it eliminated that constantly flowing through, and it will harden up nicely. That’s what we’re trying to do. If there’s ideas like that, that you see, and it stimulates a thought that hey, maybe if we do this, that’s what we’re going to do out there. That’s what we’d like to do out there because we’re trying to prove certain things work and certain things don’t
Giovanni: Greg. I think that we’re going to come to a point here, where we’re going to need to deal with edge restraints, and if we’re shifting to an open graded aggregate and an open graded installation, that becomes the Achilles’ heel of the edge restraint. How is that dealt with? I don’t know. How is it dealt with?
? Jose: Steve’s on the move.
Steve: Is he going to tell us?
Giovanni: No. It’s a secret.
Steve: It’s a secret?
Steve Johns: Yes. You know me. Keep talking I’ll get it brought up on the screen.
Giovanni: I liked that the conversation has shifted to open graded. Again, I feel that’s something that is–I think the material standards for the open graded is much wider available also. We were talking with Giovanni and he mentioned we said number eights, number nines for bedding material, and we found out that it is available down in Florida. They call it number 89, which is an acceptable gradation. I’m telling you if it’s available in Florida, it most likely is available everywhere else. That’s the reality of it. Sand, the gradations specific, what happens is if guys can’t get sand, they have the ability to go ahead and just get stone dust because that’s a byproduct of the 57s and the clean, open graded material. I think that open graded material is available in just about every market. It’s probably one of the most widely used materials.
Steve: Except for Southern California where it’s a giant market.
Giovanni: It’s a what market?
Steve: A giant market. [?] access clean aggregate.
Ryan: South California.
Giovanni: What do they do?
Steve: Dense graded.
Giovanni: It could work on that also, right?
Steve: Yes.
Giovanni: I don’t know maybe in that installation, it’s– That’s graded aggregate on your one-inch pedestal. I let the water go through and sheet off of that to something.
Jose: Does that require some sort of geotextile to prevent erosion or the dense grade’s enough to keep it from going anywhere.
Steve: I think only the amount of clay in the base that’s going to dictate the geotextile whether you’re wrapping the base underneath the guy who gets.
Giovanni: If you’re asking specifically with dense graded aggregate and sheeting the water, I don’t really think that’s a good idea. To Don’s point drainage, drainage, drainage. Water has always been the enemy of pavement, and that’s the oldest philosophy in pavement engineering is get rid of the water. Now all of a sudden, we’re talking about building pavements that we want to bring the water to it. I don’t know that that’s a good idea to do that. I’m just kind of throwing stuff out there. Personally, I don’t think I would do it. Depends on the area you’re draining, the amount of runoff that you have, how much water is coming in, at what rate? Those would be all the potential questions.
Speaker 5: You’ve got some stuff skewed up here.
Giovanni: You ready?
Speaker 5: Yes.
Giovanni: Where’s it queued up Ed?
Speaker 5: Down here. [?]. It’s queued.
Giovanni: I got it.
Steve: Phil, what’s the problem with finding open grade aggregate Southern California? Offhand it just needs a screen.
Phil: Yes. I think their actual quarries are just so far from the actual population now for environmental reasons.
Steve: It’s theirs?
[laughter]
Then you’ve got to destroy the environment to get it there.
Phil: Right. [laughter]
Steve Johns: Everything gets a little ying, little yang.
Steve: What is it? Corona? [chuckles] [?].
Giovanni: Is this the one you want? No? This is the one [?].
? Jose: When we’re talking about concrete pavers, what’s the thickness of those? How thick are-
Phil: Standard two and three eights are six centimeters.
? Jose: Okay. A lot thicker.
Phil: Yes. Three times as heavy.
? Jose: It’s also possible the polymer and the sand just has more contact.
Giovanni: What you see there is what’s up on the big screen.
Phil: Yes. Not only that but the pavers all touch each other too so there’s mechanical contact between them [?] There’s much movement in one year to the next. With a deeper joint, you get better chance of getting more of the added binder in the mix in the matrix.
Giovanni: Okay one of the issues with edge restraints obviously, I worked quite a few years with Bill Snyder trying to figure out ways to hold an edge restraint in open graded aggregates. His original method that he tried was berming base material, dense graded aggregate around the perimeter that took way too much time and effort, was too difficult. What we did is we came up [music playing].
? Phil: Yes. That’s right.
Giovanni: He used this animation to try to show the forces involved. Greg you want to pass around that industrial piece behind you.
[background music]
Now we did this many years before permeable came along, did it with standard via text, Island strips down in Florida as a way to hold edge restraints [?] basically sand.
Phil: It seems with porcelain being so thin would it be necessary to use–
Giovanni: A different edge?
Phil: Yes. Conceptually, that’s what we’re talking about and you get an idea.
Giovanni: Correct. Yes, but you’ve got a few pieces of a new design that we’ve filed for [crosstalk] sure.
Steve: Could you try wrapping that geogrid over before you put your setting material in and put it under the setting bed?
Greg: We did, but it’s not realistic because you’re trying to layout as far as you can, get within a couple of feet of the edge and if you did that, then your screen is screwed up.
Pat: I got you.
Greg: We tried it fully below and you want to be able to adjust until you get really close, the last couple of feet of pavers. At that point, nobody can screw up that measurement. Then you get within a couple of feet of the edge and measure to where that’s going to end and that’s where you set the edging. Temp use spikes temporarily to hold position, wrap the grid over-under the bedding and lay to the edge.
Jose: Is there are minimal back wrap?
Greg: Back over the top?
Jose: Correct.
Greg: Based on my experience you only need– All the load comes to the edge as you’re near the edge. As that load is coming, the more load that’s applied the more holding power it has. I would say two feet max.
Phil: The spikes just temporarily hold it in place for them-
Greg: Yes.
Phil: -using the stone and the–
Greg: The weight, the friction, [?] movement.
Phil: As a balance [?].
Giovanni: That cross up there on the screen is showing it in the soil, not in the aggregate because that aggregate–
Greg: No, that was a mistake. [crosstalk]
Giovanni: Sorry about that.
Greg: That automation was costly, as in I give up. That is incorrect. You’re correct. That’s wrong.
[music]
Greg: As the loads applied, that puts tension on the grid and actually sucks the [?] in better.
Giovanni: Do you think the lower profile with geotextile would work in a porcelain application?
Greg: I believe it would. That new edging that you’re sending around that new profile of edging [?]. This would work good for two centimeters, allow you your bedding material. It would come up a limited extension on the back, as opposed to our current pay ridge, which is large 10 tall. Then we’ve added these pending gripper ridges to the bottom, so they’re directional.
One of the problems when I first put our frictional resistance movement ribs on the bottom over the industrial is they’re straight up and down. This can’t be installed after the fact, it’s too big anyway, but on a regular pavement we learned the hard way that that ridge we added to the lip of this when it was blunt, we could not install it after the fact, so it has to be directional.
Pat: Excellent.
Greg: What we’ve done is we’ve had multiple grippers to the bottom of this, actually, we’ve reduced the grippers down to four because we need to focus the friction to fewer places, rather than too many. They’re just a couple varieties.
Francesco: When is going to be available?
Greg: What’s that?
Francesco: When is going to be available?
Greg: Has taken [?] at lunchtime when a plastics company is coming. It will be very soon. Our biggest issue right now is creating a flexible version, which will require two pieces and that’s one of the reasons a lot of people buy other edgings because they buy edging to say it’s both rigid and flexible. Well, talk to our engineer here, not really possible. We’ll have two versions, flexible and rigid [?] to the curves.
Jose: Meaning [?] two entries here?
Greg: Yes. In fact, we’ve got some designs. We don’t have samples of it yet, of our standard pavement. This would be five for 3 cm with the new concept.
Phil: We did industrial project and we ran it through a heat tunnel.
Greg: Yes.
Phil: Okay. I’m assuming acceptable [crosstalk]
Greg: Perfectly acceptable except those heat tunnels are expensive. They’re hard to find.
Phil: [crosstalk] going to use for conduit. Essentially, is what it is and they’re inexpensive, to be honest with you, but you run it through the heat tunnel it makes it flexible. You can bend it to whatever you want. That might be an option for the rigid and porcelain installers.
Greg: Yes. The cost of the tunnel [?], your guy found this thing and had it, it’s not normal. With the new design with porcelain edge, it’s a lot more doable just because of the size. This is huge for one of those heat tunnels, but yes, with the new porcelain edge.
Phil: That’s my point. You basically use the same one they use for conduit over that because there’s low profile.
Greg: Should be able to. Thanks for bringing that up.
[pause 02:47:02]
Greg: You can see how the ridge wrapped over the top. It’s not pushed tight down under the bedding because it’s a extra little lift there as you’re compacting the pavers near the edge that sucks the slack out of the grid right through here. Basically, we just pull it over tight, start laying your pavers, come through to the edge. When you get to the edge there’s that little bit of grid that’s down at an angle in your last set when you run the compactor over just because sucks it right in.
I know some people have been very able and got the grid to actually down the face and level it. No, you want to actually do a sloppy. Any comments, questions?
Phil: This would be one option for edge restraints.
Greg: Yes.
Phil: The only way you think it can be done or?
Greg: Only way. When I started laying pavers, the only answers were timbers, wood and that’s how far back I go. [chuckles] The next answer was [?] replace concrete. Then we would do it the hard, hard, hard way of putting up concrete forms around the entire job, do the entire job, including cutting, compacting everything standing.
Then we would kill ourselves pulling these steel posts out of the ground, unbolting all the forms and then we would trowel concrete with [?]. Huge, labor-intensive. The best you’re going to get. Still even with all that they still pushed up. There’s no true direct– It was not part of the system and that’s the one thing I’ve learned over these years, is that it has to somehow tie to the system.
If you’re a separate component, whether you’re a concrete beam or anything else that works a lot of time. With the grid method, the [?] method it’s tied to the system, so it’s almost together.
Pat: Pat here. Giovanni was saying that in Florida a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll take the entire perimeter after it’s completely covered and set and done, they actually lift it and take it as the setting material out, whether it’s one inch or whatever it is, and just place it with mortar and typically 18 to 24 inches back into the edge restraint. Then they set that back down on the mortar.
Giovanni: Yes. They go down about four inches. They take the setting, then they dig a little bit more. I would love to have something like this because I prefer myself to see that work putting that, then picking it up, putting the cement setting piece by piece, but that’s the only way that it’s working right now. We’re talking about who got your driveways? They’re big, big on the driveways because there’s no other way really to keep those large pieces if you have a 16 x 32 on a driveway and border, that’s what they’re doing.
Pat: Yes. With 4 inches with a 3 centimeter on top or 2 centimeters.
Giovanni: Three. No, two, not 4 inches with a three on the driveways.
Greg: Yes, with two on sidewalks.
Giovanni: Two on walking areas and there’s other two on the driveways.
Greg: Problem was trying to catch a niche with that mortar mix. With pavers, you get some leeway, right, 6- or 8-centimeters stone, you can come up the side quite away. That’s really where the original design for pavements came from because we were [?] in the concrete. It wasn’t the greatest. It was difficult in dealing with the landscape. One of the things that we’ve dealt with in this new design is if it’s less intrusive into the landscape side, and that’s really incredible. The problem is with the mortar set method, your way out into there and you make a mess of what you’ve already done, so there’s a lot of extra rework.
Giovanni: That so far that’s the only– Either that or you pour a footer all around each perimeter, that’s the other way.
Phil: I guess that answers my question about, but my fear is that obviously, this is something you’re patenting and it’s going to be proprietary to you.
Giovanni: No. The only thing that’s getting patented is because all my patents have expired, with the exception of the new patent on the directional gripping ridges. You can still put ridges on your edging, I don’t care. Yes, it’s an improvement on a preexisting design that was patented a long time ago. We’re just, I would say tweaking it a bit making a directional friction, rather than just [?].
Jose: From Giovanni. It sounds like there are other options they’re costly, more labor-intensive, take more time, but there are other options.
Giovanni: Absolutely, this grid [?] method that we put up to the public 10 years ago. We developed it with Bob [?] precise maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago for the Florida State. We call it the Florida Sand Wrap method and we didn’t see an application for it up in the rest of the US. We made that information available. It doesn’t matter who’s edging you use.
Phil: No, I think that was [crosstalk]
Giovanni: No, the concept and the system is, help yourself.
Phil: Got you.
Phil: I like that. [crosstalk] think a lot easier. [laughs]
Greg: Yes, no, you get a proprietor or something [?].
Phil: I know that after last night’s discussions and such that’s not what we’re after here, but just–
Greg: I am.
[laughter]
Greg: Honestly, you’re correct. What we’re dealing with is how to best address the issue of holding these products, trying to keep labor costs in mind, trying to keep material costs in mind. The constructability issue somehow seems to be forgotten so many times. Is it really a constructible design that you can do efficiently and correctly?
Pat: I’d like to ask Jose what you’ve done with edge restraint.
Jose: Jose here. I’ve actually used snap edge. Very similar to that I always bury it a little bit first just so it comes kind of low profile or a little bit up like three-quarters of an inch for the course one. The only thing I typically recommend is doing a retaining wall or just a concrete curb with block or something around there.
Pat: Same you mortar setting on a footing.
Jose: On a footing instead of using just edging because, with the freestyle cycles that we get in Chicago, the edging always heaves and moves.
Pat: You’re typically going down how far, 36 inches within 12-inch footing?
Jose: Typically, yes. 24, 36 inches.
Pat: You got three courses at CMU just to get back to [?]
Jose: Yes.
Pat: That 6 inch or 8 inches?
Jose: 6 inches.
Pat: Hollow core or solid?
Jose: Hollow.
Pat: Then you core fill them?
Jose: Yes.
Pat: Then do you use adhesive or do you use the same setting material that you set the porcelain on?
Jose: It’s always going to be like a poly modified. It has to be a poly modified for the porcelain. That’s what I recommend and any kind of [?]. For our region, we recommend poly modified setting bed mortar with porcelain.
Pat: Have you used the construction adhesive or the PLs or that they are using in the hardscape industry currently to set porcelain? Are you finding that they’re effective with the porcelain because there’s no ferocity like a paver? You’re not going to get any type of penetration with that.
Jose: Never on concrete. Concrete, I’ve always recommended using the sand bed mortar, but as a veneer, you can use the adhesive. It’s no issue.
Pat: I’m talking about putting the porcelain on the CMU, the concrete block that you put on the footing.
Jose: Yes. We tend to use just a vertical instant block adhesive.
Pat: I think that’s critical because when you do a patio, whether it’s raised or you’re doing a course installation, that detail, especially in freestyle environments, the originality of what we’re talking about here, a cross-section of that as part of the standards that we’re setting, that’s what we’re looking. Contractors, and again, I was telling Steve and Greg at dinner the other night, a lot of the contractors, unfortunately, don’t speak English.
A lot of the contractors, unfortunately, can’t read. They need instruction that has pictures. They need cross-sections, they need something they can look at and you see the light bulb go off immediately once they see the picture. That’s another thing that we’re looking at. All of these concepts and the things that we’re doing out there, we’re going to have to transpose that into something that’s pretty universal to understand.
Steve: Steve here. The other thing we maintain with our edging, that we’re the only one is that we always have that lift tying into the pavement. All the other edgings that are L shaped or triangle shape that don’t add that lift, it truly is not part and they all do heave and lift up because they’re not truly part of the system. They’re spiked in and they would give that resist than the lateral movement of the edging, but it doesn’t stop and free saw areas and cohesive soils from moving and eventually lifting up out.
Pat: Moving on. Next.
Greg: Are we at a conclusion? What is it?
Jose: You need everything [?].
Greg: Fair enough. We need can need [?] Open gradient bedding, open gradient base and some type of in edge restraint is the conclusion we’ve come to, but is that the standard? That’s my question out to you guys.
Steve: Steve here. I think there’s a concern at that task group at ICPI about these fortified big concrete edge restraints. It’s probably makes for a good concrete, but your issue and all the pictures I see, which was a problem when I was actually laying in the concrete edging by hand is if you got too high, your landscape is screwed. What I’ve seen as the practice on all these forums out there on the internet is that they’re all coming up very close to the top of the paver. I see that is going to be an issue going forward. Now, of course, I don’t see any other companies providing those type of Cementous edge restraint talking about it.
Pat: Everybody that’s here doesn’t have that cascade background when you say the landscape’s going to be screwed. Not enough depth in the soils, you’re going to get brown out of your grass.
Steve: Exactly. Those are all considerations. Obviously, you get to pick a product, but you have to understand the potential of what could happen if you’re using the wrong product. Like I said, this beast, typically, when you’re doing a large commercial project, your 8 by 10-centimeter stones is going to be this high up over. If that’s not enough room to grow grass or weed, then there’s nothing that will grow.
I know now, 30-some years later, that we can reduce the size of this. It didn’t really come to me until we were doing the task group conversations that nobody truly understood. The companies owning plastic and the companies that are selling plastic edge restraint really don’t understand payment. We were having this conversation and they thought they would get through the conversation in one or two meetings.
Now, we’re three, four meetings into it, and there’s no end in sight. Now, we’re looking at an initial testing budget just to get some initial testing numbers of over $100,000. The complexity of the issues of edge restraint are large. Luckily, ICPI is pushing ahead with funding. It should have happened in Salt Lake, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t answer that. That they’ll get some funding and start this process because it’s a very complicated issue with so many factors affecting it.
I wish it was so simple. They were like, “Let’s just push.” It’s a little bit more complicated than push, especially when it’s in the system.
Don: This is Don. Is my perception accurate that edge restraint on a 24 by 24 porcelain paver is simpler than edge restraint on this 4 by 4 concrete pavers? There’s less stuff to move, there’s less noise, there’s less wiggle.
Steve: Two insulation methods are used. Typically, a lot of people want to build their pavement and then install the edge restraint. They do the marketing and the cutting as they get near the end, and then they want to shove the edge restraint up against the pavers, that’s one method.
We taught both methods as we were going around the country teaching people how to properly use edge restraints. If you have the edge restraint installed first, not always possible, you actually did a cleaner job. In other words, you didn’t cut too wide, you didn’t dig too far, you didn’t build a lot of things that it saved you on.
Don: I can see that, definitely.
Steve: A lot of people, in the end, want to change the design during the job. They don’t do a good job of designing, so what they end up doing is that they over-dig, over-base, over-lay. They make their cuts, they get all bad, pull it all out. There’s a lot of wasted time, a lot of wasted materials, especially if you count the excavation, the hollow out, the excavation material, the time to compact that extra material.
Even if it’s only four inches around the perimeter, if you think about it, that the biggest dimension of the job, is the perimeter. If you add 10% or 15% to your cost for no reason because you didn’t do a good job of marking out, setting the job first, that’s money you’re throwing down the toilet or profit you’re not taking at home. Was I rambling?
Phil: No. Phil here. Steve, when doing that wrap method on the edge restraints, what if on the other side of the pavement, you don’t have an edge restraint, you’re up against a structure?
Steve: It doesn’t matter.
Phil: Okay.
Steve: It’s really the weight of the pavement on the lower section coming around. It’s the pavers on this side you’re wrapping over a couple of feet that matter.
Don: Do we have porcelain installs with that?
Steve: Those pieces with wrap method?
Don: Yes.
Steve: No.
Don: I just worry will porcelain be too light to constrain it, like a heavy [crosstalk].
Steve: No, no, no. It’s not the porcelain, it’s the load on the porcelain that’s going to hold it tight.
Pat: When there’s no load?
Steve: When there’s no load, then there’s no push. There is enough grab there all on its own where environmental conditions won’t be able to move it.
Pat: Okay.
Steve: Remember, the load is what creates the pressure.
Don: We can set a piece up, too?
Greg: Yes, we can set that up.
Pat: We can set a piece off and do it. We have all the material to do it. That’s another thing we can do, is set up an eight-foot section, do a wrap on it, lay the tower in on down and put a vibratory roll around on it. That’s going to put a force that would cause creeping or movement, which will be like the force of a vehicular or some type of heavyweight, and you would see.
As you have that downward force on that wrap, it’s pulling it in because it’s actually sucking it down over the top of that edge. You will be able to see it once you run a plate tamper on it. We can do that too.
Giovanni: Giovanni here. Being that we fairly agreed on the [?] system, at least one way of doing it. How do we approach this for driveways on 3cms, which eventually is going to happen, it’s already happening? I know that it’s going to get bigger and bigger as the years come by.
Steve: Are we speaking of flexible systems?
Giovanni: Yes. On a driveway install, I’m really thinking involving this idea with the edge restraint, and we talked a few times about that. What are your thoughts on the install on the driveway with the 3cms?
Pat: Permeable vehicular and permeable pedestrian are two different animals. The gradation of the stone and the duct of the stone on a vehicular is usually engineered as per what the pavement’s being used for. Whether I have a 6000-pound car or a 60,000-pound truck, that’s going to tell you how you’re going to do your base. Whether it’s 8, 10, 12 inches of 57, if you have the use one to three underneath that, if you have to chalk it up with number eight and then put number nine on top, or eight, nine. That’s going to be engineered. They’re going to tell you what you have to do with that.
Steve: Most of this stuff going on here is going to be residential.
Pat: Yes.
Steve: If we focus for now on residential, looking ahead to what we have, everybody here has to come up with specifications for commercial work.
Giovanni: We’re whispering stuff. Six inches of one to two, four inches of 57s, two inches of bedding.
Pat: That’s for a permeable vehicular application for residential use, six inches of one to two, four inches of 57, and two-inch, so will be six, four, and two. Six of the ones and twos, which is the larger aggregate, and then four of the 57 and two of the eight or nine with your three centimeters.
Giovanni: With a three centimeter.
Jose: Is there a need for a two-inch bedding of the stone in this application that we’ve come up with now?
Pat: No, because the joint is too small and you’re not trying to pull some aggregate into that stone to lock it in place, so you could do it with one inch of number eight on top of the 57. The only thing I’d recommend doing is a smaller code of the number eight to spread it out, choke up the 57 a little bit because you will have some migration. Then, just make sure when you do your screen, you don’t continually have that migration. Usually, if you take vibratory compaction and run it over one time, you’ll get it to a point where you can put a screen on it and you’re not going to have the filtration. Do you understand, [?]?
Jose: Yes.
Pat: Okay.
Steve: We’re talking about the installation method being four six-inch open gradient number 57s, one-inch bedding for pedestrian applications, eight-inch joints. Jointing material, Poly sand, some type of reinforced 45, or whatever you want to call it, joint material and then an edge restraint that is structural and part of this system. Does that sound like what we’ve come up with? Do we need to discuss the potential of sand on dense graded aggregate or we just rule that out?
Giovanni: I think regionally it may still be appropriate that dry [crosstalk]
Pat: Dry works but other places don’t work. [crosstalk]
Steve: With that being said, we’ve agreed that the four to six-inch dense graded aggregate mix as specified by ICPI would work. Then we come into the bedding and for bedding are we talking sand specifically? Are we talking sand or a number nine material? Then we need to consider the thickness of that bedding also.
Pat: This is pat. I think the sand would be fine, but the gradation of that sand is going to be key to the success of that. That’s where the recommendation if you cannot get this particular gradation of sand, we suggest as best practice using a number eight or number nine to replace that setting material. Which is good because it covers everybody.
If you can’t get a certain gradation that’s necessary that we know will ensure success, then move to this. I think it has to be pointed out. Who’sgoanna establish what is the best? What is the minimal that you can have? The sand that you have in Florida, it looks like it’s number eight. The sand I have Jersey is very coarse. Do you have coarse sand?
Jose: We have a good gradation sand.
Pat: I think the sand down there is pretty coarse that would probably work.
Giovanni: We’re following ICPI guidelines for that [?] no more than an inch of sand. Upsetting [?]
Pat: Inch is fine but how about the number 202? 1% to 3% through 202.
Giovanni: Again, in Florida what they’re doing is 6 to 4 inches of lying rock is what they have and that one inch of sand and that’s what’s going on the driveways, that’s what’s going on before that. Not that [?] but it should. All the driveways have been done. Up to now on the driveways in Florida is about 200,000 square feet of product on the ground home drivers installed for ICPI recommendations.
That’s the only thing that I can vouch for and see that it has not failed. The longest drive that has been down is about a year. About 5 months up to 10 months about a year. It’s been monitored. We’re going back and we’re looking in and we’re keeping our eyes on it so far. It’s been no issues.
Steve: To measure your understanding you said porcelain papers on was functionally dense graded aggregate in sand for traffic.
Pat:[?] residential driveways, absolutely. Which is the same way that [crosstalk] three centimeters? With the permanent spaces that go on top and not the ones under and polymeric sand is working wonderful because I guess now, you’re going to a three centimeter.
Jose: Do you have those [?] that work?
Pat: Yes. [crosstalk]
Phil: What if somebody comes in a little hot and [?] breaks?
Pat: There are some of these drivers that will be going into documenting it. They’re coming in with these 450 trucks. They’re getting in there now. We are recommending somewhat of interlocking pattern, even though we know 90 degrees [?] barons. He’s working on the crazy things on it. The recommendation is we’re following what ICPI does with bricks and mortar digital. No, but people are doing it.
They’re doing it on their own. Those are the ones that will be concerned the most [?]. So far and this is the thing right now, we go with that. This is thicker, by the way. I have the other one. This is the 16th which we don’t use. Basically, what we are doing here is, it comes from the top so the whole material is sitting on the sand, nothing on any other place.
We’re allowed to break on both sides so you can do patterns. They do a herringbone pattern. That’s what’s working out there now. They don’t put any of the driveways on with the disks underneath and everything’s being the sand, the polymeric sand is being compacted three times.
You put the poly they compacted it with the poly on top of it, they come back and they put more poly because it’s going in. We found that three compactions are necessary for the polymeric sand to go in completely. Literally, that’s where they’re picking up the 3cms and they’re coming up through to each other on the 16 by 32.
Jose: Let’s go in from the top. In the space.
Pat: In a space, you push it and that’s very the thinner part it is.
Steve: You have one inch of bedding sand you can place it into.
Phil:[?] so it’s pushed down below the surface.
Pat: You stay above. You have under 3cm, you got maybe you’ve got 2cm or a little bit more than 2cms space for your Poly sand and–
Giovanni: How close to the top will that piece [?]?
Pat: This is 27, right? It’s already less than three. We want to leave at least two centimeters based on the poly sand. All the corner [crosstalk]. Yes, on top of it they’re pushing it down a little bit more.
Jose: Out of the two, there’s one CMO reveal and then they got 2cm of tile above it that [crosstalk]
Pat: It’s not more actually they’re getting a little bit more. We are recommending for them to go a little bit more down not just 2cm because then we want to go back to the same problem 2cms are [?] but there is no– So far its been successful. Whenever we [crosstalk]
Giovanni: Bring us downstairs. We want to go downstairs because I want to use some of these.
Steve: Yes, sure. [crosstalk] number eight, right?
Giovanni: For using these spacers?
Pat: Yes, for over a dense graded aggregate with the same setting base. Traditional paper installed.
Giovanni: I think it could work just–
Pat: With 3cms.
Giovanni: For sand here [?] You get too much water for installers. It’s going to start shifting favorites, but I think it could work for open grade base.
Pat: Okay, for open grade.
Giovanni: That’s why we own the consensus. I agree with it too on the freestyle areas. Absolutely.
Jose: The only thing I would recommend especially in my climate is just a little thicker support.
Pat: We have thicker. This is the thinner. We have the thicker material they gave me. They sent [?] This is the three right here. This is what you use. They don’t use the [?] That’s the three right there. You want to touch to make sure you got the three. That’s the three. It is a thicker material.
Jose: You have four?
Pat: No, but we’re thinking about making it.
Don: I tell you what. I was seriously thinking about four because that’s not a thing for three is still thin.
Pat: That’s supposed an eighth of an inch that you’re going to get. You’re going to pass it more than any financial on the forum. This is working. The poly is working.
Steve: At point four and an inch. It’s three that [crosstalk]
Pat: Out here less than an eighth and then the four is going to go for [?]
Steve: We buy 30 seconds on a full moon.
Jose: I would think a hair over and eighth is what you need [crosstalk]
Pat: You probably take number four or maybe it was [?]
Steve: Spiked 30 seconds.
Giovanni: My concern was when I first started putting the product out and everybody’s coming to me and they say, “Okay, how do we do this?” I didn’t want to get a big space now in the driveway where you have these joints from the materials already going into each other because of this. I also look at it from the [?] and they’re not touching each other. We don’t want to go to buy in [?].
Don: We’re also talking about potentially robots’ easy joints, easy whatever which requires at least-
Pat: That is–
Don: -a quarter
Pat: Yes, it says at least a quarter inch and that’s why they’re on the driveway when I spoke with Jaffa, explained to them what we were doing in Florida and about the possible driveway systems that would come out of it. He said, his suggestion was, “Don’t use on your own driveways if you’re goanna have to do that.” You are going to have bigger and bigger joining there. Now, do you see a problem with the 16 by 32 on 90 degrees with a big join on the driveway install? Is that moving potentially because of the space needed to be?
Steve: Now, it’s properly jointed. The edge restraint is there. The only two ways it’s going to move is if the edge restraint moves or the joints, the material in the joints disappears, crushes rows down comes out. You have to create a space for it to move. In the joint to create space by eliminating the material that’s in there and at the edge restraint you create the space by the edge restraint moving. That’s the only two ways it’s going to move.
Pat: That can be something that we can try. I can make the spacers quarter of an inch for this product to work. He says minimum would be a quarter of an inch, otherwise, it wouldn’t work. He was confident on his product for the [?]. He said, “That’s sticking off. I’m comfortable with that but now you need to go wider.” I was a little iffy on the wider for the drivers with the bigger pieces.
Now just to clear it up I don’t recommend anything bigger than a 16 by 32 on the driveway, on a dry lake, absolutely nothing bigger than that. It’s already big enough. There’s a lot of 12 by 24s on the 3cms. There’s some 24 by 24s on a broken line being done and there’s stupid things that people are doing with it. We’re following it. So far so far good.
Jose: You don’t have issues with crop joint, with alignment or?
Pat: No, absolutely none. That driveway that you saw there is been down for eight months now and it’s– I drove by before I came to [crosstalk]
Jose: I’m not talking about after you from like–
Giovanni: During construction. [crosstalk]
Pat: During construction, no. Everything is rectified. The product is rectified, and the lines are nice and straight. It’s wonderful.
Phil: One of the things we hear in the just regular, thin-set tiles not even 2cm just typical tiles is installers are concerned that overuse of spacers because of the variation in the tile for your hard fixing the tile into a space but if there’s variation on the tile, which we know exists then the joint tends to move. There’s this fine line of using a spacer to create the right width but still–
Pat: On the unrectified or rectified.
Steve: Rectified has very, very little. Rectified has very, very little variation. I mean it’s–
Phil: It does have less variation but there’s still some variation occurring and 2cm products may be different again. It’s a real [crosstalk]
Steve: We haven’t seen that even on stupid installs where they literally, you know what they did? In some driveways they split it–
Giovanni: Stacked them.
Steve: Stacked them one after the other. You see your lines nice and straight vertically with the spacer. When I spot that I almost want to die but that’s what they wanted. They signed off on it and it’s still there but that has not happened with the 3cm that it’s being used.
Phil: Again, it may be an optical illusion type situation that occurs when you fill these things with grout and an interior versus something that may not be filled or it’s not quite the same as an exterior application.
Pat: Absolutely, sorry, go ahead. Why is 16 by 32 the largest?
Steve: I think it’s going to move if it’s bigger than that. Then you’re worrying about a car coming in and being too big of a piece. Not that I have tested it. I basically don’t want it out and I need to rephrase that. In Europe they’re using 36 by 36s and they’re doing some dry lakes and they’re doing it on vehicular applications, and I’ve seen a couple and according to them, it’s working. I don’t know that I want to go that route yet with that.
Pat: I don’t think I follow the logic of why a bigger piece is going to move. It’s going to be heavier.
Steve: It is going to be heavier. I’m just not recommending that.
Phil: With a spacer, you’re not going to lose that joint. It’s not like you’re going to [crosstalk]
Steve: Like I said, it’s been done. It is being done and I’m not saying that it could not. I’m just not recommending myself.
Phil: I could maybe see that. If you think about a piece. Let’s think about a piece that’s 16 by 16 which would completely encompass one tire from a vehicle. It means that all of the weight that’s been displaced by that tire is only on that 16 by 16 area. Now change that to a 16 by 32, now all of that weight is being dispersed by the 16 by 32, which means per square inch you’ve got less weight on each portion but then it means that it’s less weight that’s forcing the tile down. Now move that to a-
Pat: 36 by 36 or the next one.
Phil: -36 by 36 or a 24 by 48. Now the amount of force per square inch is less and it’s not wanting to push that tile down as much. I guess I could see from that perspective it might be more [crosstalk]
Jose: That’s a deflection issue. I think to what Phil’s saying is from a creep, from a lateral movement.
Phil: Less about deflection but you’re applying it’s over a wider area that you’re applying less force to that area. As the tire moves if it tends to grab-
Steve: I see what you’re saying.
Phil: -you might want to push.
Giovanni: Structural edge restraint, a curb type of an edge restraint would probably allow that to work.
Pat: Again, it’s all how that everything is nice and tight, how that is being built.
Phil: In some of the pictures that you’ve shown of these driveways you have that structural edge restraint. You have tiles on the perimeter that actually set in concrete.
Pat: Everything has a soldier course and if they want to do it without a soldier course I personally don’t–
Steve: The entire soldier is embedded in that.
Pat: The entire soldier is much set on concrete. If that is not nice and tight and [?] I doubt. You don’t need to do it.
Phil: Which again is, I’m sure labor-intensive and expensive but it ensures a good installation.
Pat: Absolutely.
Jose: It’d be interesting to see it.
Pat: I really love this system.
Giovanni: I would assume that somebody who is asking for 36 by 36, 3cm porcelain is not overly concerned with the cost of-
Pat: Absolutely.
Giovanni: Do you know what I mean? It’s not because that’s very specific.
Steve: You’re right.
Giovanni: That’s something that they just want. If you can come up with a solution and again, structural edge restraint is something that might be 6 inches and by 9 inches in depth and have a couple of pieces [crosstalk] surface flash curve. I don’t know why that wouldn’t work because its movement then is either going to come again from the joint, which the spacers now won’t allow that or from the edge restraint which that will allow.
Pat: How it’s installed too. My concern with it if there’s too much space whose movement if it displaces and then when this started to go on the market, I said, “For the America was not working on the two,” and I said, “Now we’re going to start doing the driveway.” If [?] comes out and something happened with the spacer. I started just throwing ideas of why it would fail.
Phil: Maybe the spacer needs to be more structural you know, more structural and so that there isn’t a chance of it slipping.
Jose: Or sheering.
Pat: Right now, again it is working. It is working great. I don’t know what the future is going to tell. I hope it keeps up. It is because we got above 200,000 that is been put down of this material and you know. Usually for your driveway and when it’s a bad install, and when it’s something you see it failing fairly quickly. The first driveway was done and monitored for about three months without anything else being done and what they did to answer your question.
They did a step on the 24 by 24. When I went to look at it, then I say, “What are you guys doing?” and at least a broken line on the 24. They went and their driveway and they had huge trucks going into that damn thing. I mean they have and it’s intact. The mud set. They did actually footers and they buried footers underneath there and that where muds set with.
Phil: Again, there’s been a lot of focus on how you keep the tile from moving but the tiles are going to want to move from heat, from expansion or contraction.
Jose: Not that much though.
Phil: I don’t know here.
Steve: It’s been to 1,250. It’s pretty stable.
Phil: I get it but I mean even in normal thin-set applications interior you don’t go more than 25 feet without a compressible joint and exterior is 8 to 12, I think. If you’re talking about every 8 to 12 feet you have a compressible joint that can absorb this small amount of movement. What happens in one of these applications as again, you’re in South Florida where it gets hot and it’s 70 in the morning and 105 in the afternoon? That’s a big gap and can lead to a significant amount of expansion and in this case-
Pat: By how much of an expansion are you talking about?
Phil: -significant can be fractions of an inch but if there’s a solid material in between the joints.
Giovanni: Just to go there that poly sand it’s somewhat flexible not completely rigid.
Pat: If you had failure, it would be joint failure.
Phil: That’s the concern because again in a fully bonded application the issue is tending.
Pat: The issue what?
Phil: The issue that happens in a fully bonded application with a lack of joints. Typically, either joint failure or tenting, where the tile itself, there’s so much stress that’s created that it pops loose from the mortar. It’s not common, but it’s not rare either.
? Don: I’m beginning to think that if there’s, the [?] can absorb that movement, that fraction of an inch.
? Giovanni: That sounds like a pretty flexible system.
? Don: It is. It’s not completely flexible. Well, listen, if it was just like the route, we would route it. It’s not. It’s got somewhat of flexibility in there. It’s not completely flexible. I think that for what you’re talking about, the reason that nothing has happened for over a year on the job, it’s because if that is happening with the material, that is being absorbed by that at the bottom [crosstalk].
? Giovanni: Most of the porcelain that’s being manufactured, and correct me if I’m wrong, there’s lines on the back of the porcelain. Typically, those lines are to help with the bonding when you’re wet setting how it was traditionally set on mortar. Regardless of the material that you’re setting it in, whether it’s a number nine chip, a course Floridian sand, whatever you’re setting it in, you’re going to have the ability to eliminate that vertical movement because with interlock there’s vertical, horizontal and rotational, and because this is so thin, you’re actually not going to get rotational. What you’re saying is it’s a possibility with weight and stress that you could get [crosstalk]
? Phil: What happens is, as you have these pieces, what happens is the expansion, because the facial area of it, as it expands, it will get a little bit longer. What happens is if you’ve got a joint that’s non-compressible, it has to push somewhere. What happens is in the joint, it’s not compressing. Each of these tiles gets a little bit longer so they’re now pushing against each other, and that can cause the shear stress, which will cause it to pop.
Again, that’s why there’s EJ 171 is what’s in the TTA handbook for flexible joints for expansion joints, what EJ stands for. It allows for that movement to be absorbed somewhere in the installation to prevent that stress. That’s why I was asking. Again, maybe the poly sand does allow that to happen.
? Don: Because it’s fractional? We’re talking about not a huge rift. We’re not talking about a quarter inch, an eighth of an inch moving or a sixteenth of an inch movement, expansion on the porcelain. We know that volume is somewhat flexible. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to put that on the dry because there’s movement, there’s always movement on the dry links a little bit but there always is some.
That’s why you route it and then everything breaks because it moves. To answer your question, it must be the [?] and I’m sorting that. We would not install it any other way. Any other way.
? Phil: Again, it may not be an issue or as much of an issue because it is somewhat free-floating. It’s not bonded in the way that tile would be bonded in a [?] application. It’s being restrained in a couple of different ways. You just have the restraint laterally, and then it’s still able to move some. That’s interesting.
? Don: Have you ever done Florida? We’ll see some contractors [?].
? Giovanni: Are we to a point that after lunch, we were talking loosely of heading down and playing around with things for maybe an hour or hour and a half and then coming back up here. That alludes to the timeline across the bottom there. We wanted to have discussions this morning about some things and get conceptually some ideas, come up with some things we might want to test, which I believe we have. I would say after lunch, we head down to the arena, get some education on pedestals and their installation, and then start playing around with everything else we have there.
I’d say give ourselves maybe an hour or an hour and a half. Are we at that point? Do we have some things we want to test? 2:30 or so, we can head back up here and go just wrap up everything
Pat: We’ll be talking about the considerations and everything else after we do our tests, the cutting and things like that.
? Don: Yes, I think so. Cutting is, for me, a simple– You’re going to talk about the blade not being a segmented blade, cutting in place. Can you wet cut in place? If we’re going all open-graded, absolutely. Dust remediation is going to absolutely be a concern going forward. That needs to be taken into consideration, but I don’t know that those are true standards that we need to set to ourselves here.
I think materials and processes versus the absolute finish aspect of it. You can, I guess, in theory, you could do a project without cutting but you can’t do it without base betting pedestals joining.
? Giovanni: What is the best, other than using a wet soft? Are there any other [crosstalk]?
Pat: There’s tools coming out, but there’s been a lot of– I don’t know if you’re going through the same thing. The contractors are complaining about cutting it. Again, you’re looking at a contractor that comes in from the landscape industry, they got a $50 blade and they go through that concrete like there’s nothing. They want to do the same thing with the porcelain, so with a little bit of education, with the proper material, the proper [?] and we use water at all times. At least for my experiences, it’s a must.
? Phil: I guess too, making sure you rub at the edges. That’s a specific tool, the tile installation. That’s a practice that should be used in porcelain.
Pat: Not many people because they’re not [?] people who don’t know about it, but this is, I guess, something that we could–
? Don: I think we go down there, kick it around. If we [?] an hour, a half-hour play around down there, I think we allocate whatever time is necessary, and then get back to discussions on what we tested, what failed, what we think worked. I think that’s going to fuel a little bit to keep us moving through the rest of this, like say, having the pedestal demonstration, and then starting to play around with some of those other things.
As far as I know, lunch is ready. If it’s not ready, it’ll be within minutes. Why don’t we plan on breaking for lunch at this point, and then we’ll reconvene? We’re eating up here. Lunch is right downstairs to the left of the doors and go downstairs. We can eat up here at your spot, and then we’ll just plan on reconvening it at 12:30 at this point.
Pat: Okay, so we’re eating here?
? Don: Eat up here, yes. The food is downstairs, and we eat up here in our spot.
Pat: Okay. Bless you.
[background conversation] [background conversation]
[background conversation]
[pause 03:50:21]
[background conversation]
? Giovanni: After lunch, when we go down, you guys can do the foursome gig. We have some vacuum equipment. You can set those pieces. I just made really simple– I just put the head on the top and screwed it all the way down but you can do whatever you want with that.
[pause 03:57:52]
[background conversation]
? Phil: Ryan, can you email me that section? That cross-section that you have in there. Where I can find that.
? Giovanni: Which one is that?
? Phil: With the TNA and [?]. I have a project [?] right now that I need to– I actually just got a call that we can use that.
? Giovanni: That spec?
? Phil: Yes. [?].
? Giovanni: I’ve been curious to see the difference between five to one, three to one drive pack to see how it changes. Do you have any information on that like with your drive pack, with the different sand cement ratios?
? Don: No, specifically that I can point to. [?] what happens if you do a 3:1 versus 4:1 versus 5:1.
? Giovanni: Yes.
? Don: No, not specifically.
? Phil: What’s your opinion on that?
? Don: I don’t know that I have one. I don’t think I have enough experience in it. Again, I think it’s a lot of what happens today isn’t better than it used to be. I don’t think that this [?].
Pat: What one contractor is doing in Florida is for every single installation he’s doing over a rigid base, not concrete, a well compacted [?] we call it or [?] is mixing one inch, 3:1 spreading screen and wet it, just like you have it. Coming back the next day, then setting everything in and routing it. Beautiful jobs, nice and straight, no liquids, no nothing, no movement. It’s just beautiful. It’s not over concrete. [?].
? Giovanni: Only in Florida.
Pat: Right?
? Giovanni: You’re not doing that in New Jersey.
Pat:[?].
? Giovanni: I think one of the biggest issues that we’re having is looking at battling the freeze-thaw and how after they’ve factored in cost of material and labor to do everything, they needed to do to make it bulletproof against the freeze-thaw [?].
? Phil: We’re going to have a conversation about that [?].
[pause 04:02:15]
? Phil: The dicey guy has anything like that in terms of [?]
? Giovanni: I don’t know.
[pause 04:03:07]
We used to have a guy who would take a mortar with bar sand with no aggregate, mix it up sloppy wet, dump it on the pavers and squeegee it into [?] and then try to get it off the surface so it was awesome. That was before they were doing [?] they just filled up all the pockets.
[pause 04:04:08]
Are we going to [?] number eight or are we going to [?]?
? Don: We only have [?] and I would take the sand. If you want to try [?] with the sand. I don’t know.
? Giovanni: Okay, that’s good.
[pause 04:05:18]
[inaudible 04:06:26] I can’t believe the phones are working again.
? Phil: Sign here, Ryan, so I can send this out from the [?] to my house.
? Don: What I was reading from him was some of our publications. That’s [?] and publications. The two mains that I was looking at were the [?] handbook. The [?] handbook and the other one I was reading from is that [?] book. All of the 8108 standards are [?] reading from that.
? Giovanni: That’s where you showed me that cross-section?
? Don: The cross-section came from the handbook.
? Giovanni: Where would I find that out?
? Don: Just go back.
? Giovanni: Yes. Okay.
? Don: If you’ll give me until this evening, I can get you [?].
[background conversation]
[pause 04:10:25]
[background conversation]
? Don: It was not me, but it’s 12:33.
? Phil: Is it?
? Don: I’m not sure if five or ten minutes is going to derails us, so we need a little bit more time to catch up.
Pat: It sounded like people were mostly available this afternoon too. I’m not going anywhere. I’m talking about morning about 5:00 AM.
[pause 04:11:20]
[phone conversation]
? Giovanni: My boy is the only one that ever calls. Mydaughters? where I’m going.
? Phil: Same boat.
? Giovanni: I’ve got one of them that don’t even know I’m going. I’m talking about my older daughter. She just came up eight years ago. She’s 17 now.
[laughter]
? Phil: That’s cool.
? Giovanni: Isn’t that funny? 17, That’s when you leave the shotgun leaning against the back door. She was about 12 or 13 when she said, “No more Iron Man bullshit.” She’s getting older. My daughter Tess, she cuts hair on Rittenhouse Square at a really uppity up men’s barbershop. She does beards and hair and it’s like $85 a haircut, but she’ll trim your whole beard with a straight razor, and she puts all these oils.
She’s all into it, but anyway she’s a good looker. She used to work for a buddy of mine in my barbershop down the street. I’m sitting there and I keep a handle of crown oil and a case of beer in the barbershop. I just like to be comfortable when I get my haircut. I’m sitting in the chair and my daughter is cutting in the middle chair.?
[laughter]
It was pretty funny. He goes, “Dude, I’m sorry.” I said, “I don’t care. She’d chew you up and spit you out. We’ll have to change your name to Vic, because you are a victim.”
It’s like, “I married your mum.”
[background conversation]
Make sure I get one of your cards too if I could. You guys let me get your cards.
? Don: Sure.
? Giovanni: Almost set, right?
? Don: Are you all set?
? Giovanni: I’m all set man.
? Phil: Are you guys ready to go down for the Pastel?
? Giovanni: Yes.
Pat: Yes.
[laughter] crosstalk]
? Don: We also have some of the components and wet set down there, so we can [?] a little bit about the wet set components.
[crosstalk] [laughter]
? Phil: It’s all you.
[background conversation]
[pause 04:17:20]
[04:20:56] [END OF AUDIO]
Speaker 1: They are all [?] at the bottom so when you cut this end they’ll line up at the top of the head so when you go [?] this will go but up to the [?] right here and the head will but right up to that [?] wall.
Speaker 2: Some clip systems, they have a metal clip that goes up against the wall so just to keep the tile away from the wall, it will keep it a little bit away. They have another clip system for re-doing steps like I’ve done in the past here a homeowner who wanted to step on the rooftop, so we just use the clip system and it holds the riser in place with a 2CM porcelain. It will hold it in place so you’ll make the riser in there so you can’t see underneath. It’s actually pretty secure and that was like the biggest concern of homeowners like I want to step on the edge, and it tilts over, so it actually works really well.
Speaker 3: Like that’s tilting there now.
Speaker 2: This one is only tilting because it doesn’t have weight on this side yet, so if you put weight on this one or cut off the tabs and push it in, you won’t see the wobble anymore.
Speaker 3: Does that pedestal also have a rail system?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: MRP has a rail system or you can put these tiles on top of the rail system if you want to. Different size tiles you can put it on the rail system decking with the hidden fasteners that come within the wall.
Speaker 1:[?] that comes with this.
Speaker 3: Is that aluminum?
Speaker 1: No, at the [?]
Speaker 3: Connect to the rails [?]
Speaker 1: The rails are aluminum but the [?] is just the regular. [?] put your wood joist right to an angular with joist [?]
Speaker 4: They make those without tabs for center spots.
Speaker 1: Break them off.
Speaker 4: I get that, I’m just asking.
Speaker 1: Just beak them off that’s all.
Speaker 4: Okay. It’s an additional. That’s all. That’s fine.
Speaker 5:[?] thicker thinner three-millimeter, four milliliter spacers [?]
Speaker 1: There’s four millimeters.
Speaker 5: They’re four, they are only four [?].
Speaker 1: That’s right.
Speaker 4: He said it will drop to about 5% grade?
Speaker 1: Yes 5% I grade.
Speaker 2: It’s pretty much over.
Speaker 1: Yes, pretty much covered everything on that.
Speaker 4:[?] set a few?
Speaker 1:Yes, if you want.
Speaker 2:Personally, I’m Mexican [?] back in the day so I’ll just hand install them.
[laughter]
[crosstalk]
Speaker 3: You want to hand install? [crosstalk]
[crosstalk]
[hit sound]
You are bigger than the typical ombre.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: That’s really all it is. Once you have your perimeter set [?] your perimeter at least squaring it off. You go 10 feet I have it along this way, do your three four five methods square it off and the center it’s just installed so quickly
Speaker 4: That self-leveling is nice.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 4: It’s really nice.
[tin sound]
Speaker 2: That’s all there is really. Along the edge just break them off.
[hit sound]
Speaker 2: Dave will get a new pedestal.
Speaker 3:[?]
[laughter]
Speaker 2:[?] along the edge. It really is all there is to it.
Speaker 3: Instead of cutting that and wasting your time [?] the tabs off slide it all the way underneath.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: Difficult contract removed, that’s good.
Speaker 2: One thing you do have to check [?] is your [?] wall heights. In Chicago it’s 42 inches. That’s all you can [?] starting point. Your threshold at doors as well is another thing, I always check first. MRP offers support where you get the dimensions so that should let you know what sizes and how many are aluminum.
Speaker 3: How many of each particular part of that system that you have, how many pieces of each
Speaker 2: How many [?] of each size and extenders you’ll need.
Speaker 3: That’s huge. Is there a general rule of thumb with a two by two like one pedestal?
Speaker 2: Two by two 1.25.
Speaker 3: Per piece.
Speaker 2: If you put it on the corner its per piece.
Speaker 3: Like the blackjack’s one, so they say.
Speaker 4: Why would it be different?
Speaker 3: I don’t know.
[crosstalk]
Speaker 4: All the same sizes [?]
[laughter]
Speaker 3: I’m just telling you they say one he says 1.25
Speaker 4: It’s one in the field but you have a little bit extra because when you get to the perimeter, you’re going to have to cut pieces.
Speaker 2: It depends. You can do the math and 1.25 is typically giving you just a little bit extra and depends on the size. If you go 10 by 20, you’re going to have less pedestals than if you go the same square footage but a different shape because we’re going to use a couple more along the perimeter. 1.25 is typically where I recommend. At 2cm anything over some could say six inches, other people say 10 inches, you have to put a center [?] then it will be 2.25 per tile.
Speaker 3: If you exceed the two feet. Two by three [?] like that piece over there.
Speaker 4: He’s talking about floor height.
[crosstalk]
Speaker 2: Pedestal is [?] say its six inches.
Speaker 1: Some say one.
Speaker 2: Others say 12. There’s a couple that say three quarters of an inch, you need to put the center one. Personally, I’ve installed thousands and thousands of square feet of this and only in three jobs can I remember that they requested [?] and it was for like a six-inch pedestal.
Speaker 1: When was your last install.
Speaker 2: Personally that I’ve done, when I was working is about three years ago but with this system I tell a bunch of my contractors that have used other systems like [?] I tell them if you want me to go to job site with you, I will help you for your first install, I’ll give you a discount so you can try the pedestals and you get free labor. We go and we get it done pretty quickly. The [?] leveling [?] really does saves a ton of time. 1200 square foot roof top, three contractors would take them about Chicago about four days. Actually, we went with the company and we got it done in a nine-hour day.
Speaker 3: Free union labor in Cleveland is a little bit exciting.
[laughter]
All I got to do is buy your pedestals.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: Any other questions? It’s a pretty straight forward system. There are other systems out there that have the self-level head as well. It’ll work just the same. Really there’s a lot of contractors that have different methods of installing it. This is really easy if you do the perimeter then on the inside its one its one pedestal, one tile, one pedestal, one tile. Just keep going that way, it’s so much quicker.
Speaker 3: I don’t think there’s going to be many issues with pedestal except for determining what you need [?].
Speaker 1: The only thing we got is [?] said before is [?].
Speaker 3: The one question I have is when you actually recommend the rail system. What height dictates when you switch to rail system.
Speaker 1: What size is the tile? Does that dictate it?
Speaker 3: Size of the tile or height. What would qualify me to use a rail system with that?
Speaker 2: The size of the porcelain so 12 by 48 you want to use rail system, just easier to break apart your lines using less pedestals. You’re just using the rails.
Speaker 3: Size of the porcelain will dictate the use of the rail.
Speaker 2: Use the rail.
Speaker 3: Is there a general rule of thumb for the contractor to know when he has to consider that.
Speaker 2: Pretty much like anything 12 inches is recommended to use rail system. It’ll save money because you’re only doing a pedestal every two or three feet on the rail system.
Speaker 3: That’s going to be more planks?
Speaker 2: You are going to use a lot more tiles and if you do just without the rail system, you are using essentially a 20-30. With a 12 by 36 or 12 by 48 [?] using a pedestal every two feet and then everyone foot so you’re using way more pedestals that way. it’ll save you money and save you time and that’s ow I’d use the rails.
Speaker 3: Are those on 16-inch center or 24 inch centers?
Speaker 2: The rail is 24 or 36 depending on the weight.
Speaker 3: What if you’re doing like a two foot by four foot where you need support in the middle?
Speaker 2: two foot by four foot depends on the manufacturer. Some say you have to put one at the center as well so two foot by four foot you have to put one pretty much the same as you would do 24 by 24. I have installed them as well without it, just a 24 each one and anything on the center because you’re essentially grabbing– It’s 124 by 48. It’s grabbing six pencils. It will actually hold pretty sturdy on all sides without creating any– The biggest problem I’ve seen is just the vibration if something falls on it, it vibrates and shatters it. That’s the biggest issue with porcelain but they told me five pounds about five feet. If you drop something five pounds about five feet high, it’s going to shatter. Others recommend doing a membrane underneath the porcelain.
Speaker 3: Mesh.
Speaker 2: The mesh. It looks like carbon fiber mesh.
Speaker 3: It’s like the safety net.
Speaker 1: It’s an anti-fragmentation membrane.
Speaker 2: A lot of contractors’ misconception is it’s going to make it stronger. It doesn’t at all. All it does in case I shatters, you don’t get pieces all over the place.
Speaker 3: Is that mechanically attached to the top of the pedestal?
Speaker 2: That’s actually installed in the tile, the mesh. [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: The difference is there are tray systems too that go under the pedestals.
Speaker 1: I was wondering if it’s like a roll or that you roll out the pitcher.
Speaker 3: No. Typically, it’s going to be a precut piece and you peel and stick onsite.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: It depends on– [crosstalk]
Speaker 4: What’s the size of the piece? Excuse me for interrupting.
Speaker 3: The standard piece that most people stock would be 24 by 24.
Speaker 4: So, you use two of them [?]. When you do your vertical rail, is it only vertical or is it vertical and horizontal? Does that change or it’s always one direction?
Speaker 2: It’s always going to be one direction.
Speaker 3: Okay. Interesting. That’s just an example of a different pedestal system that’s just the one step. They have all different attachments just as this has different attachments. The main difference with this, is it’s a self-levelling head. It has the sixteenth of an inch click and there’s like eight to ten clicks that you can move it to make adjustments. That’s about it on that. Any questions about the pedestals? Any main concerns about the pedestals? Pedestals are pretty cut and dry. It [crosstalk] dictates what you can do and what you can’t do. Again, having someone who’s knowledgeable to help a contractor, I think that’s going to be critical for the success of that and moving just from the rooftop applications to residential patios and like that pool deck I showed you. There’s a lot of potential for other avenues of usage with porcelain.
We’re all pretty good on rigid concrete set with [?] membranes, waterproofing, the bonding agent, the different troughs that you’re using. The only thing that I wanted to bring up and we didn’t do an example of it because we’re all pretty standard with your wet set but that just has the synthetic mortar, has the different acrylic bonding agents. There is grout, exterior grout. That’s just the fabric and antifracture membrane. I actually use this on a bunch of jobs. It’s really effective. You put it down [?], you lay that and typically over your control joints or expansion joint so they won’t propagate through and that’s basically what– On that one deck I did with the TI pro-board and that was a roll on any fracture and waterproofing. There are sheet products that can be used.
My only thing with that is when you said the drop test from five feet with five pound and we did the same thing. We used a piece of bowling ball actually. We did it from four foot and we did it on the area that was molded on the back and the tile was not molded on the back and we found that probably three out of five times we dropped it on the tile that we had the setting material on the concrete and we put the setting material on the back of the tile– Actually, we ran it one direction on the base and one direction on the tile, so when I put it down, it created a suction and filled it out.
Three out of five times we dropped it on this or an area that wasn’t mudded on the back of it, it broke and that was the opposite with the other– I mean, maybe once out of five times. It really did add structure to the installation but unfortunately, it adds the labor too. When you’re trying to be competitive and have a competitive edge, a lot of the guys aren’t mudding the back but that’s an integral part of the installations, understanding the structure that it adds to the installation by mudding the back too. That was the only point I really wanted to bring up about the installation on a rigid base. Thoughts? Anybody? Agree, disagree?
Speaker 1: Agree.
Speaker 3: Pretty straightforward with that. Good. Let’s go over these sections over here. [background conversations] Did you bring those other spacers? This was just on the 57 with the number eight on top and again, you could see when we set this, we didn’t put anything in the joint. Again, even just the pressure from the body weight, you see how these [?] to the– [background conversation] They went down a little bit and you can see on each particular one that’s set into the stone and it’s pushing up a little bit. If I had put a vibration on this, that will be a considerable difference. Any thickness that base is-is the basically going to be hidden in that number eight. You see that? He just went to get the other spacer. That definitely wouldn’t work on this, but it would work on a– [?].
Speaker 1: Hold on to me Pat, we’ll get down there.
[laughter]
We can’t get– It will take everybody to get us up there.
Speaker 3: I had total knee replacement; it just [?]. This is pretty straightforward depending on whether you do it. You’re always going to have to keep the spacer in it. Since this is a permeable application, there is nothing in the joint, so water would flow to the joint and flow through it. I think for residential applications for patios, sidewalks and things of that nature that this is way more sufficient. It’s a good installation. It’s a very contractor-friendly installation too.
Speaker 5: The back, is subgrade?
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1:[?] base?
Speaker 3: Subgrade meaning the dirt?
Speaker 5: Well, both I guess.
Speaker 3: Yes and you are going to have a separation fabric in between your 57 and a three-quarter inch clean stone underneath which, remember, is 46 inches but you’re going to have a flowable geotextile fabric that’s going to prohibit the soils from pushing up into the stone when you do your compaction. Then, from [?] the moisture when water expands 8%, when it freezes and the soils come up through and eventually, they work the way all the way up to the top.
Speaker 2: Sure,
Speaker 3: By putting the separation fabric and putting your 57 clean, you are eliminating the possibility of contamination of soil and filtration to that soil because the water is not getting to it. Then, you’re going to choke it up with your number eight stone. I would probably put a scheme coat on top, give it a light compaction just to fill the voids. Then do your screed, stay with your one-inch screed because that’s going to be, I think for the leveling. I’m not concerned about anything coming up through especially with the two centimeters. This is clean anyway when we don’t have anything in the joints. Now, on this particular job, if I slit sand on this, what’s going to happen in the clean chip?
Speaker 1: It’s going to migrate down.
Speaker 3: Is this going to keep going down into those chips and if I add vibrations to it, it’s going to go down even deeper? As you say on that and it’ll probably be a good test to do if I get a bag of the sand and dump it on it and sweep it and slightly tap and vibrate a little bit in here. Then, what we’ll do is we’ll just pick it up and see how much actually spread. Just make sure you get the whole piece.
Speaker 1:[?].
Speaker 3: All four sides, yes. Just keep sweeping on that and [?] the vibration and we’ll see how far that actually spreads. [background noise] See how [?] to the joint? That spreading this way how far it’s going. One thing that you said, Giovanni, that they do in Florida especially with that spacer you’re relying on that to spread a little bit so when you hydrate it, you want the whole thing to get wet to create– To weak out and create a soft point so it doesn’t lift out of the joint. Whether that actually happens, I don’t know, you don’t know.
Speaker 1:[?]
[background noise]
It’s actually filling better than I thought.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is. This is actually edge restraining, you put a vibratory roller on it with the rubble [?]rubber, you can basically just overlap half a path each ways you’re going and we’ll do that in there because we’re on top of the number eight stone and that’s all edge restraint. We can actually put the sand on that in there and then run the vibration on it.
[background noise]
It’s still going down. It’s dropping pretty good.
Speaker 1: What’s the standard for filling the joints? [?] top of the tiles?
Speaker 3: Great question. I don’t have an answer to that.
Speaker 1: What is it for grout.
Speaker 3: Grout is typically [?].
Speaker 1: It can’t be flushed [?]
Speaker 3: Unless you’re using [?] Again it’s for channeling the water too. [?]
Speaker 1: Again, for a [?] application, you’re-
Speaker 3:[?]
Speaker 1: -you’re putting it down with the grout blow and then when you clean, it gives it a little bit of a channel, so you usually clean it after it’s got some dry time and then it creates a little bit of a channel. Sometimes it will reveal that bevel [?]
Speaker 4:[?]
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 4: The pavers sand load would save one-eighth [?] below the top of pavers.
Speaker 1: Bottom of the chamber.
Speaker 4: Quite a lot of pavers don’t have a chamber.
Speaker 1:[?]
Speaker 3: [?]
Speaker 4: Yes [?]
[background noise]
Speaker 1: That [?] in the joints to take out this one right here to see how much wind is underneath this one.
[background noise]
Speaker 3: It’s basically a very little bit.
Speaker 1:[?] vibration.
Speaker 3: I was expecting to get a little bit more underneath it. We can do that. We’ll leave this over here because on this side, what we did on top of the engineered face, we swept the sand and if you’re vibrating this over here, it just continually falls, and it really dissipated. On this fabric after sweeping it twice and vibrating it, I’d be curious to see– I think that it’s going to be a lot less on this side where its travel on the fabric.
Speaker 4: The other thing is what I’ve noticed right out of the gate there’s zero [?]. Absolutely no resistance. Typically, segmental, the sand joints create a lock in there that they came out like it was almost like there was nothing.
Speaker 1: I think we’ve been relying on also is polymeric sand to give structure to that joint to hold it together [?] That’s only been swept three or four times [?] for three or four days, five days and the sand will just continually disappearing on that, which tells me when polymeric sand hydrates and it dehydrates, there’s certain times that it’s dry. When it’s dry, if there’s vibration on that patio, what’s going to happen to the sand joint? It’s just going to continually [?]
[background noise]
Speaker 2: Is there fabric under this part.
Speaker 1: No. I just did it on one [?] because now [?] and just continually keep falling out. I know with any vibration, again, on dehydration when it’s dry, it’s going to move. That’s definitely a maintenance issue. That’s probably a couple of times a year, you’re going to have to apply some sand to that. On this side, what I did is I put the fabric thinking that it’s going to prevent the movement of the sand underneath by having– It’s just fills the void.
[background noise]
You can see [? up and down [?] like five or six times a drop down a considerable amount and it’s still dropping down. On this side, it’s barely moving, which tells me for six to eight [?] square foot and by using a non-woven fabric underneath this on an engineered base, it’s going to help to contain that sand.
Speaker 2: Don’t they say to put a small amount of sand on top of the gator base though?
Speaker 1: For leveling?
Speaker 2: I think it might be for that same thing.
Speaker 1: Originally with any engineered base, you’re screening your sand and you’re standing that right on top of the sand. I’ve never heard of this putting sand on top.
Speaker 4: How do you put a little [?]
Speaker 2: Yes [?]
Speaker 1: You know why? Because you can see the holes? The drainage holes.
Speaker 4: Yes, you’re right. Maybe I just remembered.
Speaker 1: Maybe it’s filling the drainage holes.
[laughter]
Speaker 4: You’re all right?
Speaker 3: How do you want to do this?
Speaker 1: How long are you willing to do it?
[laughter]
No, I think we’ve proved our point. Can anybody see what I did? Agree, disagree, do you it’s a consideration to think about and further?
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: Because you can see it’s dropping down up here, but in this section, for the most part it’s still.
Speaker 4: My question is, are we looking today to have all of these installation methods figured out?
Speaker 1: No. All we’re doing is stimulate thought process so we can-
Speaker 4: Because again, the evolution of the thin-set methods has always been, there’s one and then that leads to another and that leads to another and as more develop, you have these templates essentially that you can then apply and then modify and that’s how the installation methods continue to evolve.
In the same way, if you could go a couple of different ways, you could go with what’s the absolute easiest one to do in terms of installation or you could go with the one that’s most conservative and I’m going to guess that those two things are not the same because the easiest might be what we did over there, but then if you’re going to introduce anything else into the system, then it’s going to become more complicated, but it will also potentially lead to a better installation.
[crosstalk]
Speaker 1: Here’s what you’re thinking about also. Say you’re in an apartment, you’re in a row house, they’ve got a 20 by 20 patio in my backyard, I’ve got water coming off the roof, I got water from the neighbors’ yards, everything else. I’m probably going to look at a permeable application because I know there’s always going to be standing water and I don’t want mold against my house, and I don’t want a drain on my foundation.
I would look at some type of permeable because I know this on an engineered base with polymeric sand, if it’s always wet, I’m never going to have sand on my joints, so that wouldn’t apply. Looking at these applications, each application has its use. I think the variables as they change, that’s why you consider different application methods, not necessarily what’s easy and what’s more contractor friendly, but what is going to last when they put it in the ground.
Speaker 4: Keep in mind that we decided up there just before break that this should be standard. We have three scenarios. How do we joint it? That was one of the things, the concerns and that led to the discussion on the edge restraint and that. We’ve got to figure out something on this. Do we know that if on the eights the push-in spacers are going to be better or do we want the pedestal spacer?
Speaker 2: They may not go in [crosstalk] They may not go in and if they don’t go in when you vibrate it, you’re not going to compact it, but on the [?] you don’t push it in, and if you install it the wrong way, and when you vibrate the come up a little. That’s the only downside to it. They have to push it in otherwise– I don’t know if you will go in in here all the way down even though for the 2cm they’re 17, for the three [?].
Speaker 1: There’s no movement on that.
Speaker 3: No. Ultimately, what we’ve decided is this installation, those pedestal/spacers and we’re not getting nearly as much material going into the joints as we thought. We’re going through the joints as we thought. It looks like that would be a standard for installation on eight. What if you wanted to use sand and you did open-graded base 57s geotextile and sand?
Speaker 1: Geotextile–
Speaker 3: Over the 57s to separate-
Speaker 1: The sand on top.
Speaker 3: -that migration of sand. Then you could use push-in spacers which are a lot easier to install.
Speaker 1: Any other water that does go through can dissipate into the free draining underneath thus not having a saturation of the sand and movement or deflection of the corners. Is that what you’re saying?
Speaker 3: Well, all I’m saying is stopping the bedding sand from migrating all the way through into the 57s.
Speaker 2: And allow the water to still go down the drain.
Speaker 1: Yes, because that was one of the main issues with the sand is saturation of that setting bed and movement. I think that most of the failures that are out there are because there’s a saturation, water’s setting in that setting bed.
Speaker 3: If somebody says, “Yes, I have to do sand because that’s all I have around.” They could if they put down a geotextile separator.
Speaker 1: With a permeable filtration fabric between the 57 and the sand screen.
Speaker 3: Well yes, geotextile. We would have to find the specification for that geotextile also. I would assume it will be a heavyweight, non-moving type of material.
Speaker 2: Although they are highly flowable.
Speaker 3: We can have it float, we don’t want the apertures in the flowable, right? If we have apertures in the flowable potentially fines could migrate through depending on the size of the opening.
Speaker 4:[?] pretty small.
Speaker 3: They are pretty small. I don’t know if they’re less than 200 and we shouldn’t have more than 1%.
Speaker 1: It will choke off pretty quick anyway.
Speaker 3: Choking off, that wouldn’t be a good thing. [background conversation]
Speaker 1: A different kind of choking off. [laughs]
Speaker 3: Okay. With these applications, with the open drainage materials
[00:32:44] [END OF AUDIO]
Speaker 1: Rubber on the corner.
Speaker 2: Rubber pedestals do help but I can’t really vouch for how great they felt because I haven’t walked on that patio yet. I haven’t done it with high heels and I’m not going to either. [laughter]
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: It would make my calves pop though.
[laughter]
I don’t have a handbag to go with it. [background noise]
Speaker 1: There should be a cord on that. [background noise]
Speaker 2: When you look at that, there’s actually more sand on that side than this side. There’s almost double the sand over here. See that?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: That fabric does limit the migration. See how that line’s almost double? For five or six cents additional square foot with a nonwoven fabric underneath-
Speaker 3: It’s the labor also. We did that five times, six times and still didn’t get there. [crosstalk]
Speaker 1: Is this the normal thing or is this-?
Speaker 2: No, that’s a [?].
Speaker 3: We didn’t wet it.
Speaker 2: Yes. Once wet, this will have some structure to it also. The first time it rains, it’s not going to wash it out.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: Correct.
Speaker 2: By having that permeable nonwoven fabric [crosstalk] underneath. I have an outlet for moisture to allow that the opportunity to dehydrate. I was just trying to [crosstalk] here with different applications. The things that are actually being done, contractors that I know and how they’re doing it and things that have worked for them.
Speaker 1: Could the nonwoven not also be put under [crosstalk] installation so that you get a better bond?
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: You get more of that polymer or sand or whatever you choose to use to fill the joint, if you get more of it in there, you have a higher chance of it bonding and doing what it’s supposed to do so that it’s not your failure point.
Speaker 3: Yes. Like Greg said, on this side over here, I swept that five to eight times. I swept that two times, labor also.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think you could totally apply that over here too. If you’re going to join your [crosstalk]
Speaker 1: Yes. If you’re going to join it, I think you want to probably use the nonwoven.
Speaker 2: I would call it best practice.
Speaker 3: You wouldn’t even need the engineered base but, again, I put that because the DIY market for people that are buying porcelain doing residential applications are using the end in your base. It’s a reality.
Speaker 1: My question for you is- sorry, guys. I’m going to go away from the two ceilings just to go on the three. If we do that on the driveway application, you’d put the [?]. [crosstalk] Will it move with the car braking over it?
Speaker 3: Yes. You’re never going to put geotextile between your setting bed and the product on vehicular because you’ll have a slip [?]. It will move.
Speaker 1: That’s not good. We won’t use it.
Speaker 3: He got a bag of sand. We’re going to sweep that in. We could do it out here or we could go in there.
Speaker 2: Is that going to be in the transcript also?
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: Okay, Cool.
Speaker 1: That’s got to be. [laughter] [background noise]
Speaker 2: That’s going to be that black right there, redacted.
[laughter] [background noise] [background conversation]
Speaker 3: Do you want sand or chip?
Speaker 2: I don’t know. That’s going to be group consensus.
Speaker 3: We need a piece of edge restraints and grid also, correct?
Speaker 2: If you want to try that, yes.
Speaker 3: They wanted to see that also.
Speaker 2: It’s going to require some group participation.
Speaker 3: Are we screening sand or are we screening chip? [background noise] Does anyone want to [?]
[crosstalk]
We’re working with the supply [?] to the factories [?] [background noise].
Speaker 1: Do you start any occasionally with the concrete?
Speaker 3: Yes. Yes, absolutely. They have the similar of that thing they use that you buy it [?] just to clean up the [?].
Speaker 2: Yes. I think that’s a piece of concrete, right?
[crosstalk]
Speaker 3: That’s basically what it is but you have [crosstalk].
[laughter]
Don’t fail me now, Nate.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: That’s good to know because we’re seeing it in our laboratory and some tests require you to cut tiles into a smaller size and what we’re finding is that it takes longer to cut the tiles for the test than it does to perform the test.
Speaker 3: With the proper machine with the two horsepower with the proper [?]. We do [?] to our customers ourselves. We do [?] a lot of cutting and that’s another reason we work [?].
[crosstalk]
Speaker 2: With hydraulics in mind. Yes, with heavy hydraulics but when you take your [?].
[crosstalk] Right. You’re putting in a heavy form.
Speaker 3: [crosstalk] assume we’re going [crosstalk]You got it, or you want me to get it?
Speaker 2: I’ll try.
[crosstalk] [background noise]
Don’t get outside the wheels.
[background conversation]
That’s got to go down first, right? The edge of it? The thread’s got to go first.
[background conversation]
Speaker 2: Squish it out a little?
Speaker 3: Yes.
[background conversation]
I’ll bring it back.
[background conversation]
Speaker 2:Really, it’s two tiles down anyways. Now we’ve got to move this.
Speaker 1: Move what?
Speaker 2: The bedding. [crosstalk]
Speaker 1: Where do you want to saw it?
Speaker 2: I’d rather fill this in and saw this out.
[laughter]
Speaker 3: I have that same philosophy. Keep moving. You put it where you want it. You’re not even close to being on.
Speaker 2: See that big bump in there?
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: [crosstalk] on one that’s sticking out further than the [?] right there, perfect. [background conversation]
It says 25-30 miles per hour.
Speaker 3: Huh?
[background noise] [background conversation]
Speaker 2: I did hit the porcelain over there once.
[background conversation] [laughter] [background noise]
I think everybody here is capable of setting them. I did all the [crosstalk].
Speaker 3: We need to get the bigger spaces because I don’t think the site’s spaces are going to work. We have them here.
Speaker 2: Somebody needs to put this on so they can lift the tiles and put them in place.
[background conversation] [laughter]
Speaker 3: Where are spacers? [crosstalk] that’s not connected right over there.
Speaker 1: Where are your spacers?
Speaker 3: My spacers are right there but I don’t think they’re going to work.
Speaker 1: It’s two centimeters?
Speaker 3: If you want. Listen. You got a compact disc?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: No, see, those are for three. The two centimeters, we didn’t bring it. Those are for three centimeters only. We’re going to go through that same thing we had before for this one with those.
Speaker 2: The horror and the pain.
Speaker 3: The horror and the pain and the cutting and the breaking.
Speaker 2: Let’s just do a stack bond. That way we can just line up the corners.
Speaker 3: All right. [background noise]
[background conversation] [background noise]
Speaker 2: Looks good [crosstalk] It was out there, and everything needs to go, I guess.
Speaker 3: It needs to go.
Speaker 2: That way, yes
Speaker 3: Yes. [background noise] These spaces are not fun.
Speaker 2: No, they’re not.
Speaker 3: If I asked [?] that wouldn’t work in here. [crosstalk] I asked them, they said they didn’t send it when they first sent this one. Will they send it now? [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: There were three. of us walking [crosstalk] We were all walking on it. We were all trying to set it. That one won’t go down just because the grid came up [?].
We’re going to war or that’s it for these?
Speaker 3: Yes, that’s enough.
Speaker 1: No more of that property.
Speaker 3: You don’t keep driving the Titanic whilst it’s sinking.
[laughter] [crosstalk]
Speaker 4: Amazingly enough, when you look on this side, even with those spaces’ underneath, it’s touching the stone, so they are going down in the chip.
Speaker 3: Is that going to be a problem?
Speaker 4: No, there’s no space [?] over there the space on the end of your base there’s no space here from walking and moving and chipping, it goes down. [crosstalk] The three quarter? Yes, we compact it to three quarter.
[crosstalk]
Speaker 2: There was a lot more time put into that.
Speaker 3: I’m assuming you guys want to sweep that, put some sand on it?
Speaker 4: Yes, we’re going to hit it with the compaction.
Speaker 3: First? Can we sweep it first?
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: Nobody in this crowd knows how to use a broom?
[laughter] [crosstalk]
We had a hard time with the spacers but look.
Speaker 4: I have no idea what to expect as far as cover I suppose.
Speaker 2: A lot.
[crosstalk]
Speaker 4: This is three, so this is going to take a lot of–
Speaker 3: Make sure on the outside edges we fill in between the porcelain and the edge restrain before we put the compaction on it just so there’s no movement.
Speaker 4: This other section here, we’re going to need about four or five bags of sand to make it go a bit to the top.
Speaker 3: You think so?
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 3: I don’t think so.
Speaker 4: We’ll see, maybe not.
Speaker 3: I think you’re full of shit.
[laughter] [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: We got plenty of sand.
[crosstalk] They’re getting 300 square feet on their sand fill bags. 250 to 300.
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 2: Yes, with the compaction, three times compaction. [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: Well we’re on chip two so compacting.
[crosstalk]
Speaker 2: That’s what I was thinking that they might lose some. That may be a good thing, you think. That if they come in and go under and mix with that chip and that water could get in there do you think we get [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: Do you know what we could do? Maybe after we compact it, we can wet it and after 48 hours pull one piece out and take a picture to see how it set up. Do you know how long it takes to cure? 24 hours?
Speaker 1: Is it windy?
Speaker 3: Is it windy? Not yet.
Speaker 1: How hot is it?
[crosstalk]
Speaker 4: There’s no wind in 60 degrees [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: Do you know how to compact it?
Speaker 4: Which one do you want first? The heavy one?
Speaker 3: Yes. Let’s try that one. I’m curious to see what that one is going to do. [background noise]
Speaker 4: Here comes the Webber
Speaker 2:Webber. [crosstalk]
Speaker 4: They like to remind you about everything.
[laughter] [background conversation] [background noise]
[pause 00:40:00]
[background noise]
Speaker 1:[?]
Speaker 2: I’m impressed.
Speaker 3: That’s all that [?]
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 3:[?] your corner there, curve it.
Speaker 1: Yes. I got it.
Speaker 4: You might just want to–
Speaker 2: Coming at you there. Step quickly.
Speaker 3: Fire in the hole.
Speaker 1: Now that one is even stronger than the other one. Right Steve? Much stronger?
Speaker 2: Much.
Speaker 1: This is a 5,500.
Speaker 3: I told you it might be fun to–
Speaker 2: This is 3,700?
Speaker 1: This is 3,700, that’s 5,500.
Speaker 2:[?]
[pause 00:42:07]
[background noise]
Speaker 1: What do we got [?]
Speaker 2: Now we’re going to take the 5,500 pounds with the rubber plate.
Speaker 3: You’re saying that.
Speaker 2: That’s what I said.
Speaker 3: You’re close. Everybody asks, “What’s [?] Well, a few months of testing like we did, you can figure it out.
Speaker 1: [silence] Well I think to some degree, we’re also starting to get blow out. Not the joints.
Speaker 3: Yes. Made you full.
Speaker 1: I’d expect it to happen with this also.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: Yes.
[pause 00:43:57]
Speaker 1: This is the one that goes 90 miles an hour?
Speaker 3: Yes, leave and like me.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: It’s like Sonic the hedgehog, this one.
Speaker 2:[?]
Speaker 1: That’s a little bit down. A little bit.
Speaker 3: As soon as the [?] one is warm is- That’s when you turn the throttle up.
Speaker 2: The exhaust is hot.
[pause 00:44:50]
[background noise]
Speaker 2: Well, I can keep this on too. No guarantees on this. [?] Well, run it anyway.
Speaker 1: Do you want to join meet the first?
Speaker 4: Probably.
Speaker 1: That’s very [?] I would expect this to be relatively ugly.
Speaker 3: Yes. I would too, but like what wouldn’t though? [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: No one’s going to be worse than they have a rigid brawler. It would crank the [?] You might as well beat it up. Not as fun as doing [?]
Speaker 1: No cracks, no chips, no structural breaks.
Speaker 3:[?]
Speaker 1: No, these black ones, they’re clean. You can’t pick it up and cutting them.
Speaker 2: I don’t care for that.
Speaker 4:[?]
Speaker 1: Tell you what, I don’t see any corner break, any edge break. I don’t see any slits on the 32 inches.
Speaker 2: Nope. They’re over 50,000 USN
Speaker 3: Yes. They’re actual [?] you saw them ready to go?
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: All right, that’s what I’d know.
Speaker 2: They have that one. That’s why they all come back. Yes.
Speaker 3: They’re backing us, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes. That’s the one they were contracting with. It’s what they were doing.
Speaker 1: What do you think?
Speaker 3: Great, yes. Kill it. You heard it. You can try.
Speaker 4: You ever seen anybody [?] compact.
Speaker 2: Never had it in the [?]
Speaker 4: It does work.
[pause 00:48:47]
[background noise]
Speaker 3: Well, I’ll tell you one thing, if we had that restraint, we would’ve had got an expansion of the joint.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: It didn’t break.
Speaker 3: It didn’t break.
Speaker 2: It point loaded right on the damn chimp.
Speaker 3:[?]
Speaker 1: This is 30,000 PSI.
Speaker 3: It’s a relevant measure.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: It’s a marketing measurement.
Speaker 4: I don’t know off the top of my head.
Speaker 2: I guess one of the things we’re worried about, I know we’ve got clay industry here, we’ve talked about using the steel plate and backing. No pad, no nothing. They’ll go, “Oh dear God, no it’s just burning up.” We ran through all their pads, you know what? No breaking.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yes. You come out a little nervous about their experience.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: If we could get past that, can do probably you think about it. You get a pad.
Speaker 2: When you’re looking at this plate compactor that should be 500, ultimately because you only have a 2 centimeter, clearly, we could put that much weight on it but in reality, do you need that much weight? That much cylinder for the force?
Speaker 1: No. You compact it to [?]
Speaker 2: Correct. For the hardscaper that it a minimal, 5,500, 5,000 you just want to prove a point [?] on it, you can/can’t resume.
Speaker 1:[?]
Speaker 3: Do I hear and saw; you know I’m thinking about it.
Speaker 2: No, I don’t think so.
Speaker 1: Are we going to talk about it?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: I think I would like to do with Alex. Do [?]
Speaker 3: Go. If you’ve got it.
Speaker 2: Sounds like fun. Break the biggest one you have.
Speaker 1: Break what?
Speaker 2: Record it.
[pause 00:51:10]
[background noise]
[background conversations]
Speaker 3: We can do that; we got a fix for it.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: I’m just curious, if it will make a difference?
[pause 00:53:37]
[background noise]
Speaker 2: What did we learn?
Speaker 1: Nothing. You can drive over this video [?]
Speaker 3: Definitely. I agree. Definitely the three. Even what Jumali said in reference to the VGA set of sand, we have a custom sand but I’m pretty confident with the chip.
Speaker 1: If the sand is no more than an inch on the three, again, all [?]
Speaker 3: The three, definitely. I would sand set to three. I would.
Speaker 1: Do you get a [?] though?
Speaker 3: I don’t know about the two, but I mean that’s some bulletproof. You could take a [?]
Speaker 1: Not much getting through that.
Speaker 2: That’s not even left with my [?] as far as we’ve [?] taking into consideration. We had to external [?] We’ve been starting and stopping. On this you were running the edges, and the base installation, the edger strength is going to be [?]
Speaker 1: Can’t sell without it.
Speaker 3: We’re on this. It might be 2 feet apart.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: You can’t sell it that way. I meant to see this is [?] at least Mike brought this. When we put this on drivers, and whenever he’s got that ready. This is going to have to come with it, as a part of the whole thing, or today’s spacers as part of- you’ve got to buy it, or I won’t let them install it. They even have to buy an extra stream like that.
Speaker 2: What about them running their theme, orange [?] hat along the edge and mechanical fastening of this [?] on?
Speaker 3: They want to do it-
Speaker 2: I mean, I’m just trying to think about, maybe that’s faster than the rack method.
Speaker 1: Well, this is not racked, right?
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: This is not racked. This is not racked but this is just that, basically you’re shoving it in there-
Speaker 2: With the rack method, you’ll have to use 2-centimeter spacers along the edges. That’s all it needs, so 3 centimeters in the field, 2 centimeters on the edge.
Speaker 3: That’s here for the [?] from what I’m seeing here. We don’t have to rack it.
Speaker 1: Everything’s good.
Speaker 2: 230 upstairs?
Speaker 1:[?]
Speaker 3: What’s that?
Speaker 2: Is it 230 upstairs?
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: That’s good. Yes, I mean, is there anything else because we need to do down here, I mean?
Speaker 3: Somebody get out of my carrier, a couple of microphones, that would be great.
Speaker 1: Who knows? Can we drop a hammer on it?
Speaker 3:No, we’re great.
Speaker 2: Yes. Would you want to drop a hammer on it?
Speaker 1: Let’s not do that.
Speaker 2: How big of a hammer would like to drop?
Speaker 4: You guys are really trying to break it, huh?
Speaker 5: Don’t drop a bowling ball on it, whatever you do.
Speaker 2: Would you grab that for me?
Speaker 4: Yes. [sound cut]
[pause 01:01:32]
[sigh] [laughter]
[01:10:59] [END OF AUDIO]
Speaker 1: Lots of fun.
Speaker 2: It certainly didn’t do what I expected.
Speaker 3: What were you expecting?
Speaker 2: More breakage with the compaction. A lot more breakage.
Speaker 3: It has to do with the frequency of the compaction. Everybody’s compactors are on higher frequency because they do reach deeper than the old-style [crosstalk]. Personally, I was pleased with the mat. Those rollers are things you’ve got to push. Push, pull. The nice thing I liked about when the mats working [?] machine travel speed, you’re humping. You don’t have a choice. It’s pulling you along.
Speaker 2: Yes, you’re following that [?].
Speaker 3: Then you’ve got to focus. One of the reasons that we made it travel fast, so that the operator stays focused. The biggest problem with compaction is the [?] [crosstalk] they’re not even doing lines. They’re like [?] all over the place [?]
[laughter]
Speaker 1: With the different installations that we looked at and the testing that we did, we’re pretty much all in agreement with the pedestals that pedestals are going to dictate what you do and how you do it for the success of the installation of the product, regardless of whether you’re doing a two centimeter, three centimeter, four centimeter, whether you’re using mesh, whether you’re using a rail system, you’re establishing a slope. It’s all pretty much, not self-explanatory, but it’s at least that the guidelines are existing and it’s good.
Speaker 3: Correct.
Speaker 1: Also, with the concrete base, with the synthetic wide set and the grout joint and looking at– I think the only thing that really would– Just to substantiate the fact that by mudding the back of a tile instead of setting the tile without mudding it the difference with the drop test because it makes a difference. I think that’s really the only thing that was in question [?] to prove that structurally it has more strength doing it that way.
Looking on permeable base with the number eight or number nine and using a spacer or pedestal, we didn’t really come to any conclusions on that, whether you needed that pedestal to stop deflection, we didn’t do anything to see if we had deflection by laying 2 foot by 3 foot or 2 foot by 4 foot larger pieces or even 18 by 36. That’s still a question.
I think we do agree that with the number 57, the three-quarter inch aggregate impacted on soil substrate. With a one-inch screed, the one inch is sufficient. You don’t need two inches. If you’re looking at a permeable application, the four inches of the 57– I’m sorry, six inches of the one to three, four inches of the 57 and we agreed not two inches of the chip of one inch. It’d be six, four and one.
Speaker 2: For vehicular.
Speaker 1: For vehicular. Again, that’s going to change with structurally depending on the depth of free stall and the actual weight being applied to that on a regular basis, which will change the depth of your aggregates to give you more integrity, more strength.
The next that we looked at was the engineered base, which is– Our professional contractors are going to flock towards that. That’s a regional thing. I know in the New England area; they’re nuts about it. They do it quite often.
Speaker 3:[?] Gators, that’s their area of influence. they come out of Montreal, yes. They’re doing it.
Speaker 4: You’ve got a product; you’re trying to sell it. They have yet to provide the evidence to ICPI to convince our engineers that it’s worthwhile. This is an ongoing thing. They’re trying, it’s their product. Give them all the credit in the world for trying that. I just– I don’t see much difference between that and using a geotextile to stiffen your base or your bedding material. I really don’t. There you’ve got a much more complicated system than just using a geotextile.
Speaker 1: The good thing about this group and the people that are here and the people that we know and are affiliated with, we have an opportunity to take all these scenarios prudently. Yes, this works, this doesn’t work. I think we are all surprised by the compaction. I don’t think anybody in here anticipated the two-centimeter doing what it did when it compacted it.
Speaker 2: Of course, it was unrestrained on two sides.
Speaker 3: Unrestrained and not uneven all the [?]. [crosstalk] I was waiting for the pieces.
Speaker 2: So, did I, so was I.
Speaker 1: Once we really install that, the three centimeters, you’re are doing the same thing with the two centimeters. We proved it. It works. It’s effective.
Speaker 4: Do you think that two centimeter performing the way it did is a product of the bedding?
Speaker 1: Great question.
Speaker 4: Because the number nine stone is more structural than sand. We only had an engineer.
[laughter]
Speaker 1: Maybe we should have sand set it and put it in sand and play-compacted to see what it did. That’s something to think about in the future, to test that.
Speaker 3: We had started play before we could fill in all the blanks [crosstalk]
Speaker 1:[?] With a rug.
Speaker 4: two centimeter or three?
Speaker 1: Two
Speaker 4: Two? Okay.
Speaker 3: It was awesome. They got a moving blanket; you know the thick quilted moving blankets wrapped around the [?]
[crosstalk]
[laughter]
Speaker 1: Does anybody want to add their thoughts about what we did and how we did it? What we should have done differently?
Speaker 2: It’s a good start.
Speaker 4: I personally just have one question. We’re doing a permeable base underneath the pavers. Where do we want a thicker joint to allow more water to infiltrate through?
Speaker 1: Great question, because there’s no porosity to that porcelain and everything does go through the joints, you’re going to have to establish the flow of water, the pitch and there’s a lot of variables that may dictate to you how big that joint has to be. Is it a random 45 degree? Is it the four different size pieces that you’re laying that your joints are all over the vertical horizontal or are they uniform joints that are all vertically lined up? Is it a stack bond? There are variables that will change that will lean you in the right direction, but I don’t really have an answer for that.
Speaker 4: Is there a minimum joint that we want to consider for the permeable application?
Speaker 5: Just deep enough, wide enough to be able to put some poly sand in there properly.
Speaker 1: Quarter?
Speaker 5: Eighth inch.
Speaker 1: Eight inch being the minimum.
Speaker 2: I’m sorry. If we’re trying to get water to go through, then we’re not talking about poly sand.
Speaker 5: No. When I try to get water through, I use the azpects? that are-
Speaker 3: Easy joint.
Speaker 5: Easy joint or even the easy pro from [?]
Speaker 1: Does that work with the eighth of an inch?
Speaker 5: Quarter inch [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: Quarter inch minimum for [crosstalk]
Speaker 4: Fair enough.
Speaker 1: That motorcycle is going to be a top drop spacer.
Speaker 4: Do you have any of the spacers, your top drop spacers?
Speaker 1: Steve, top drop spacers that you said you had.
Speaker 2: I’ll get them [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: Just ask the boys where the enviro pavers.
Speaker 1: How thick are they?
Speaker 3: All different.
Speaker 1: You can get something less than-
Speaker 3: They’re typically made for pavers, so they haven’t created much for porcelain. I can tell you that right now.
Speaker 1: They are probably a half to three quarter inch in thickness.
Speaker 3: In height.
Speaker 1: Or even more.
Speaker 2: They’re using what, three quarters of the height of paver?
Speaker 3: They vary.
Speaker 1: Again, everything that we’ve done here, and I believe what Steve, his intentions were by recording this and having it transcribed with everything that everybody said is to get a copy of the notes from what was said and what we did here today. Think about what I said and maybe come back with some other thoughts that can be added to the transcript to plan a second meeting or I don’t know. What are your feelings at this point, Steve from moving forward with what we’ve accomplished here?
Speaker 2: Well, the format of the next meeting, I would like to know everybody’s thoughts. Do we need a facility like this or another where we can play or are, we going to test out some more theories or are we just going to noodle this thing because that really dictates what where and who we go to do this next meeting?
Speaker 1: Also, with the thoughts and what’s being said when they look over the transcript and add their thoughts to it, it may add different players that would be a part of the next meeting that we thought would be beneficial to add to the group and what we’ve done.
Speaker 3: Being that we already have these standards from TCNA on the wet application, right? That’s what you guys are following right now and with what we did today on the [?], what else would we need to test beside for the next meeting to be [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: I don’t know as well. [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: Unless something else comes up, I really don’t know that there’s a need for it but my personal thing.
Speaker 1: What’s time I look like on the transcript roughly?
Speaker 2: As soon I send it to them, they say they’ll get it back to me like within a day or two. It’s all digital stuff they do these days. Hopefully, once I submit it, I’m headed home tomorrow. I’ll hopefully get it submitted to them by the end of the week and hopefully we’ll have it back by the end of the following week.
Speaker 1: Wow. That’s fast. Okay. Well, for me, I definitely want to look at that and see what some of the lingering questions might be like the permeable joint material. I still have thoughts that the low pedestal with on jointed could have value and we’re about to get a bunch of it in the ground pretty soon. I think some of those things especially for other parts of the country, we got to be looking at what are some regionalities and what are some variety of potential solutions.
Speaker 2: Again, to what I’d suggest because I think we all have the resources to do it or the facilities to do it but when you get your low pedestals in, is there any reason why you can’t lay it out? Take some still photographs with explanation and share it with the group which would enlighten us on what your thoughts are, then that way we can add to it what’s necessary to add.
Speaker 1: Yes, no reason whatsoever.
Speaker 6: Steve, I just send an email to everyone’s business card that I have which includes instructions on how to go to our website and download a free copy of the TCNA handbook and the NCA on a white book. The information that I was reading off today comes from those two documents that should definitely be applicable to the motor setting of these piles as it relates to what we talked about. There may be some information in there as well that the group can consider.
Speaker 3: I think [?] recording. Maybe for the next meeting, is there a necessity for us to talk about on the dry lay now? Since we came into consensus, that word dry lay is possible to cm, is there a limitation in sizes that will go on a dry lay to cm that we need to discuss?
Speaker 2: Well that’s where the proof of concept by laying it out and breaking. If you’re going to 2×4, you’ve got those [?] little heads.
Speaker 3: For my personal experience with the contractors in Florida, they are all complaining that it moves too big [?] they can do and they’re not doing [?]. 24×48, 8×4 even worse without being on a dry pack or some pack that something that holds it together. It’s not being done anymore because they have a lot of problems with it. You step to one corner; the other corner comes out. It’s too big and it [?]. That’s the biggest thing, more of the blanks, the blanks sizes which a lot of people like to use.
Speaker 2: Do you have any experience with that?
Speaker 4: A lot yet. What I have heard is, this isn’t to talk about even in the manufacture, but it can be a source of the tile dependent. Some of it once you get to the larger sizes, some of it does turn to have a little bit different.
Speaker 2: If it’s [?] install it. He’s not used to making ship flat. He’s used to touring the base, giving it all in. It’s back to flatwork done. If you’re going to be doing those super [?] flat.
Speaker 3: There’s also limitation on the size of the project that is been done. You want to do an 800 square foot [?] in round with the 24×48.
Speaker 2: Those spacers that the Greg handed out, that’s a product line with carrier from Germany [?] and we’ve actually been selling those for 25. It’s more trying to figure out why they did it. It is more than a lot of places, it wasn’t that it was first from the permeable because that wasn’t even on the scene at the time that they’ve been selling their spacers, it’s more for the visuals, for the architects and stuff that wanted to create wider banding spacing and stuff so we’ve got some really big pieces there.
Speaker 6: Those are the smallest ones there because some there are two and three times the size of that.
Speaker 2: Those ones with the rings and there are tubes. Yes, that’s for [?] start to get those supervised but they weren’t. The interesting thing is-
Speaker 3: [crosstalk] Yes, I don’t know why it wouldn’t work with porcelain other than the height.
Speaker 2: Those things when you sweep in the chip, the crusher aggregate, it works fine. Again, it’s one of those things the wider the joint, the more we get a drag chip out, so people don’t care.
Speaker 1: There’s no mechanical contact from one paving unit to another, just the spacers? Technically, not really interlocked.
Speaker 3: The interlock will come into the jointing material, correct?
Speaker 2: No. [?] three quarter of an inch wide joint.
Speaker 4: You swept 57s in there; you couldn’t get it to lock?
Speaker 2: Now, we did that at Dale’s house. It rocked and rolled. The narrower joints, the narrower stuff under quarter inch. If you sweep in the bigger aggregate, yes, it’ll lock up but once you start to spread out to that three-eighths half-inch stuff, all gone.
Speaker 4: We did 4x4x16 with three-eighths inch spacers for joints in an alleyway [?]. It’s working. A service alley.
Speaker 2: Lot of turning, no?
Speaker 4: It’s got a bend. It’s an L shape to it. Yes, they’re going to turn going in there. It’s L shaped. Again, you’re not talking a road. It gets the occasional once a week service truck type of thing.
Speaker 1: For those big spacers that you’re talking about, Steve, what kind of projects are those used on?
Speaker 2: People that are looking for the effect.
Speaker 1: Right. What kind of traffic? What kind of application?
Speaker 2: I’m going to say more typically a pedestrian but some of these projects have been quite huge and so there’s at least maintenance vehicles.
Speaker 1: Maintenance, some of the emergency vehicles sometime probably.
Speaker 2: Mostly it’s the maintenance people when they’re bringing the high lifts and all that sort of stuff in that. That causes enough problems for everybody. When people are looking for a visual effect trying to take a product like it’s like the architect can’t leave things alone, they can’t take from their pallet or materials, they want to create something freshly new. I don’t blame them for that because they want to express their concept. Sometimes the two don’t mesh. The available products, the technology can’t give them a good pavement and get them where they want to be. Sometimes that’s a struggle.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: You laughing at me?
Speaker 3: I’m laughing at Pat. [?] specifically. For the record, he is drinking beer [?].
Speaker 2: Did we move the beer already? Good, thank God. Beer is in the fridge fellas, don’t be shy. Bourbon’s downstairs.
Speaker 3: About time you said that.
Speaker 2: Well, we don’t have to worry, we are not leaving till tomorrow, right?
Speaker 4: That’s right.
Speaker 1: What is next?
Speaker 2: Any comments on the– this for me is pure for me. Any comments on the [?] rate and the methods that we showed and displayed down there?
Speaker 3: I really like it. That’s all I have to say.
Speaker 2: I don’t think we did the wrap method any justice.
Speaker 1: No. That was pretty horrible.
Speaker 3: I mean it’s a simpler application when it’s better thought out. I think that two-inch bedding is a game-changer for it. One-inch bedding I’m not sure is enough.
Speaker 1: In what way?
Speaker 3: It came up through it.
Speaker 1: Oh, when you laid it out. Well, it was cold. The issue with some of the edge products out there actually I think that aluminum edging where they screw the stuff to it. That stuff rolls up on you. It’s like, roll it up, lay it down also become chasing you off the pavements.
Speaker 3: The worst one is the snap edge, their version of that’s because the grid that they use is so rigid. It has such a memory that– they roll it so that it rolls up. If they roll it the opposite way they’d be in better shape. They can’t because of the way they weld it on there, and it would roll backward and essentially disrupt the flow.
Speaker 1: Yes, when I saw one of these pictures at a city, where they were using that, I mean I looked at the picture and I thought of Steve McQueen because it reminded me of him jumping on the motorcycle over that barbed wire fence.
[laughter]
[crosstalk]
Speaker 4:[?] project, we did almost 3000 [?] feet of it and it was miserable because it was walkways, four feet walkways. We had to overlap, we had to cut it down, it was miserable. Absolutely miserable.
Speaker 1: That’s one of the reasons because, with the grid wrapped method, you can use any edge restraint, you don’t have the issues with attachment. You can’t use the soft grids with any product, attach to any product. No glue will stick, to it. No welding, no glue, no nothing, so the nice thing is if we had more space, taken more time, we could have seen how we could pull those in and pull uptight and do a good job.
Now, I will tell you that Chad Johnson from structures had issues with pushing and creeping on in the initial set phase after the jobs were done and I asked him if he had done all the [?] would he wrapped it back over the edging and he never did reply to me so I can’t answer that. I said, ”Well, did you pull it tighter or did you try to push it tight in the corner?” Just a for instance story.
Speaker 4: We are not going over any of these things, here right?
Speaker 2: I think we should go over the content of the folder. It’s why it’s here, right?
Speaker 3: Oh yes, hey.
Speaker 5: Forgot about it?
Speaker 2: Yes, we had to really [?]
Speaker 3: I do have one question for anybody who is experienced with it and we talked about it a little bit the other night but why [?] not an option for porcelain?
Speaker 5: I think it would be. Who says it’s not?
Speaker 4: Nobody.
Speaker 3: I don’t ever see it specified or anything. Is it just nobody’s thought about it?
Speaker 4: I think that it has been specified in some cases. I know that a part of the presentation that we’ve done with Mapei is they talk [?] so it’s out there.
Speaker 3: It seems to me like it’s in the current application, [?] we are doing. It would solve the deflection issues or whatever, you know what I mean? It creates a– your pavement now becomes your two centimeters plus your inch of asphalt, plus your X of concrete. If it’s five inches of concrete, you know its seven-inch fit pavement. Fit’s all together. I feel like that would be something that could be done.
Speaker 1: Greg question, Steve here. Is there anything that we’ve done today that wouldn’t apply to slab paving?
Speaker 3: I don’t believe so.
Speaker 1: Did we ever come up with the– since I’ve been away from the association for a while, is there anything that we’ve done as far as installing slab installations [?]
Speaker 3: No, I mean I think [?] who wrote a report on flight pavements, larger, he had something on it. There are several reports out there on it, but they all say the same thing that the lack of interlock the flex roll. Yes, it’s all confirming everything that everybody has been saying.
Speaker 1: Yes, so they don’t argue against what they’ve already promoted.
Speaker 3: No. Nobody’s come up with a new thought on it.
Speaker 1: I look at this and I look at the effort in the development we are going through here, and I can see how what was done out there today and what’s been going on with porcelain could easily be applied to large slab paving.
Speaker 3: Is there a limitation to how thick porcelain can be made?
Speaker 4: Right now, it’s being made in 5cm, 6.5cm and they are on the works to do 4cm that we talked about it before with the spacer on the smaller sizes. We are now going to come out with the 6X12, 8X16. With the spacer, just like the paver, halfway through an eighth of an inch spacer. The five centimeters that is being made are ready. It’s already in the market. We are already selling it.
Speaker 3: What’s the size of it?
Speaker 4: 24X24, 16X24 and 8X16. They are being rectified, so they are coming rectified and straight with no spacers yet. Something for the future, and then the Cobol stones are unrectified. Let’s say mono caliber but they go in and they don’t go out. That is a little bit different the way that they are doing it, but that’s a 6.5 cm Cobol stone. That’s in a 4X8, 4X4 and 8X8 for now.
Speaker 2: Yes, what’s our content? Steve, you put these folders together so I didn’t know if you– well, I think I– You should leave that part of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, listen, I’ll be happy to. We grab some specifications, we are not necessarily agreeing with what’s there, but I think we have to thank the companies whose public websites provided this information. One of them is Abbotsford and Pat, this information came from their efforts in making available the aristocrat’s porcelain. That was a Chinese product and now they have been purchased by Oldcastle, so we have to give our thanks to Oldcastle for leaving that information up on the internet and allowing us to share it with you. I just want to give them credit for it.
Speaker 3: On the aristocrat the Abbotsford, basically the installations that we went through, we try to give and I was pretty much responsible for writing this one, but it’s pretty inclusive with the different methods of installation that we showed out on the floor, but again not to say that this is absolutely exactly the way you should do it, it’s recommended. I backed it up with the landmark, [?] they have an installation guide also that we printed theirs also just to kind of give you two or three different installation specifications and so forth. Just to read through, digest and if there is one that you have in comparing it to, to see if there is something that should be added or taken away from this.
Speaker 5: I just got a quick question in a minute. It’s Dave Schroeder, on these pedestals that you have here, those are blackjack [?]
Speaker 3: Blackjack.
Speaker 5: They are [?]
Speaker 3: Are they?
Speaker 5: Yes. Pedestal. That’s why I was kind of curious. Correct?
Speaker 1: Is that the Aristocrat one or?
Speaker 2: Aristocrat, yes.
Speaker 5: They’re [?] pedestals.
Speaker 3: Well, maybe they purchased and renamed it the way they renamed it because they’re selling it with their– like Aristocrat is new grass, but-
Speaker 1: Listen, I would ignore the name brands and stuff.
Speaker 5: All right. I just was curious that they were purchased-
Speaker 3: That’s what happens for concrete calls, blackjack pedestals.
Speaker 5: Sure. If you look at the one’s downstairs, all those, they all say Element John.
Speaker 1: Who says we don’t crossbreed them?
Speaker 5: I just was curious.
Speaker 1: They call that cross-marketing [?]. Inbreeding happens everywhere. We found these. They have some valuable information. They don’t all jive with one another for sure, but this shows us that we have some big players that have yet to come to grips and bring it to the single service. Ryan, I see your organization as being important in bringing these specifications to the center of the road.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things Doug brought up was getting a more standardized testing and standardized installation is what several of us were looking for. We can see right now; we have three different versions of installing. Porcelain, I think is essentially the same product. I’m not trying to take away from anybody’s manufacturing processes or individual quality, but the slab is the slab part of the installation. The moving pieces are how it’s installed, and we have a different version for each manufacturer, for each seller, reseller, whatever they are. I think that is part of the issues that we’re getting into.
Speaker 1: I think if there was a way to get buy-in by the major players to agree to come to a consensus on the installation side. As a manufacturer, you don’t give a hoot how your competitor manufacturers are parceled. That’s up to them. The testing proves out their product good or bad, and performance out in the field. For installation, it makes absolutely no sense to argue about installation, because that’s not an argument. Here’s the best-recommended practices for installing porcelain. We need to come to grips with that.
Speaker 3: Here we’ve got Lever’s information here also. Does it give force in that on these?
Speaker 4: The larger one was 3700 and the smaller-
Speaker 1: The one that wasn’t there.
Speaker 2: Yes, is like 17.
Speaker 4: 33 and 17, 31 and 18.
Speaker 5: Yes, 1800.
Speaker 6: When did we get [?]
Speaker 3: When do you use the little one?
Speaker 6: When do you use it? The specification guide [?] because if I’m taking care about [?] that have these three pieces of paper, I’m going to say the very good one, it is the oldest one. One year later, the procedure, so the men in my group, and probably the newest one, it is your one. In our industry, it is a matter also of understanding how big the problems and which direction are you have to go.
Speaker 1: Evolution.
Speaker 6: Evolution, so–I was going to say this is, for me, historic, 10 years ago and this is now.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: Prehistoric, historic and [?]
Speaker 1: That’s beautiful.
Speaker 6: Now, we have to do the future, so we’ll say this is what we have to do. I don’t know if you agree with me. This is mirage [?] buy from Niraj in Italy and this is the first mention of installation guide. One year later frontier, it is the American production of Niraj, and then there is a new one made by yourself by [?]
Speaker 5: Aristocrat.
Speaker 6: Yes, Aristocrat, so three steps.
Speaker 3: It’s all your fault Pat.
Speaker 1: They finally, it evolved into them asking a contractor how to install, which is interesting.
Speaker 3: That’s the rare part. That’s one of the issues in any association industry development. Typically, they go to the contractor last, if ever. I think-
Speaker 1: Our meeting expectations started off. Francesco had, what I took out of it was understand if we are all in the same boat and standards for two centimeter and three-centimeter materials. How did we do on that?
Speaker 6: I think we are in the same boat. You prefer [?].
Speaker 1: I would think, without a doubt, this room is.
Speaker 6: We are in the same boat, and then what we have to do now is to try to speak even the same language because the more we understand from your side, the more we understand from our side the activities for everybody. I want to say maybe something more about the next step, but for me, it could be on a good occasion for you to come to visit us to see our facilities in Tennessee or wherever we are.
Maybe to Giovanni if we want to go to Florida, but if you want to take a look about in which way we are going to produce the material, I think it is very important also for your side to understand what it is simple and what is difficult for us because again, we spoke before about 2CM.
The difference between 2CM and 3CM in terms of resistance, in terms of effect with the hammer. I did I don’t know how many tests with glasses. If you want to see beautiful videos of me trying to block empty bottle of champagne, empty bottle of red wine, empty bottle of white wine, beers, big beers, small beers from the floor.
Speaker 2: Don’t waste full ones. If you ever drop a full one, I’ll be mad.
Speaker 6: Because, again, if you had tried asking me, if I have a bottle of champagne, your material is going to be broken. This is the market. I’ve said that. We need to understand what we can do. If we can’t do something for the 2CM to make 2CM more sellable because we know, again, the 3CM, we are losing because 2CM, it is stronger from the beginning.
There is room, I think, to work in the installation side with different kinds of sand, maybe different kinds of stones, different kinds of joys and spacers, and also from our side because, again, we are producing 2CM. We have to install the 2CM with [?] so the other part of the tile is made to receive [?].
It is different if I have to go and try to go deeper inside the stone or deeper a little bit more inside the sand, and there is the possibility to play a little bit differently with the back part of the tile to make the material a little bit more stronger. I’m saying something. You agree with me or not? If you are testing a material breaking strength, flat on the top, flat on the base, and you test the material, you achieve a certain number.
The same material, even a particular kind of under backing gives more strength here. This is what I was saying. In any case, we need to understand if there is, again, the possibility to increase our standard in terms of production and we get some installation because again, we need to be stronger and talking about the 2CMs.
Of course, it will be the same for the 2CMs too because why we have to propose 2CM, 4CM or 5CM if maybe we are also able to make 3CM stronger in production and installation. Why you need to bring heavy stuff [?] by the sea inside a container or on the track to home if we are able with the two and 3CM, which is something we’re producing every day, able to paint all the standards you need. I think this is what we have to do.
Speaker 1: A couple of takeaways. One, you drink too much.
Speaker 6: Yes.
[laughter]
Speaker 6: This is something I did in the past.
Speaker 1: Did we tell them the story about people asking, “Can we drop a champagne bottle? Will it break it?” We kind of had a similar preconception that the two centimeters was going to fall apart, and it made me think of, in the late 80’s when we were doing trade shows, when we had pavers on the floor, people would stop and wouldn’t step on it. They would ask if they could walk on the pavers. Like, “Can we walk on these?” I guess there’s a lack of education from that standpoint that something that is beautiful can’t be durable or can’t be strong. Yes, educating them along that standpoint, absolutely, I think that needs to be done.
Speaker 2: Steve here. Remember what we came up with at DIA back when they allowed vendors and people like me to participate in the paving committee meetings. They came up with a marketing program, genuine clay pavers with a logo. When we came up with it, we always argued about the words and how they got placed but, ultimately, it all came out. I think as a way to set porcelain pavers aside from tile is you need to have a brand that the industry can grab hold of and promote, as a generic thing saying, “This is an outdoor paving product that meets certain standards.” That goes back to producers who have to embrace such an idea and propose how to come to that, but most people still struggle today with porcelain tile being used outdoor for Artscape. Watching a bobcat crawl around on there and do what it did, I’m ready. Come on. Let’s put it down.
Speaker 6: It is a matter to change the point of view of the people. I don’t want to confuse your staff too much, but we are producing [?] slabs. Slabs for [?] slabs for different kind of application like [?]. If we want to sell this latch for countertop application, of course we need to do this with the right people first. Second, we have to change the name of the brand of the material. We are not saying, “It’s porcelain.” We are saying it’s something [?] with something inside with some [?] blah, blah, blah. We need to speak differently even with the architect because if they are thinking it is a porcelain tiles, [?] they don’t want to buy it.
Speaker 3: Yes. Porcelain is brittle. If it was synthetic granite, they’d be all over it.
Speaker 6: Yes. It is true. That’s why flooring would cause the material mile stones or the other factory [?] the call serpent stones. In case they change the name of the material and even so, they are not speaking anymore about it is porcelain. Is it correct, engineer? You know it is porcelain. They are testing that it’s porcelain but if you open a brochure, they are not talking about ceramic, they are talking about it is something very [?] by [?]. If you are not familiar, you are thinking it is not porcelain.
Speaker 3: It’s important for the porcelain industry to come up with that brand and the generic branding for porcelain pavers. I don’t think it’s the contractor’s job and right now you’re marketing against each other with different names for the same type of product.
Speaker 6: Sure.
Speaker 3: I think if TCNA was here to do their job, on the marketing side, [?] it would be to help them come up- work with them to come up with a brand for porcelain pavers.
Speaker 6: I’ve been talking to Ryan about that. Every time when an architect sees porcelain tile specs and they look at porcelain, even saying, “porcelain pavers,” they’ll say, “That’s a porcelain tile.” They completely shut it down. Most of them. Not all of them but most of them.
Speaker 3: Yes. It’s a battle.
Speaker 6: It’s a battle to go in and put that explanation. It could have been easier if the TCNA comes in and helps with that. It’s going to help everybody in the long run.
Speaker 3: Phil, what do you guys call it?
Speaker 1: Porcelain paver.
Speaker 3:[?]
Speaker 1: Yes, but you make it a point to explain the porcelain paver is not a porcelain tile. I did that fine because we call it the same time. Porcelain paver.
Speaker 2: Everything that goes outside for [?] tiles under the brand name of exteriors.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: At least it puts you in the frame of mind that that’s an outside product.
Speaker 3: You have to find the distinction.
Speaker 5: That’s what we do.
Speaker 2: Yes, it started when a lot of the companies at first were calling it extra thick or extra or something along the lines of a thicker tile. I don’t think that stuck that great.
Speaker 3: No. That failed.
[laughter]
Speaker 1: Don’s hopeful takeaway to learn what the installers need from manufacturers. Does that sound right?
Speaker 6: Yes. We got a good dialogue. I’m content.
Speaker 1: You good with that? We can check that box. Brian said that we’re all idiots and that we need to be educated like an engineer.
[laughter]
That wasn’t it?
Speaker 2: I would never say that.
Speaker 3: Compressive strength is not [?] [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Speaker 1: Brian’s desire was understanding the needs of the installer, standards for the industry similar to ASTM or ANCI and to just essentially learn.
Speaker 5: Check the log notes on your car on the way out.
[laughter]
Speaker 1: What more do we need to do on that?
Speaker 3: Honestly, I think that I got what I needed from this group. Like I said, we’re already in the process of looking at what to consider for a product specification. What criteria carries over that we already consider for traditional thickness porcelain tiles and then what other criteria do we need to consider for these products since at least a lot of what we’ve talked about today is not bonded. That product not being bonded- we need to understand how it performs, how to test it. I think I got a lot of what I needed. Just as an example, we’re certainly going to look at impact testing and originally, we were going to look at impact testing over sand, but I think, after today, we might consider changing that to-
Speaker 2: Number eight.
Speaker 3: Number eight or-
Speaker 6: Or do them both and see how they compare [?] [crosstalk].
Speaker 3: It depends on whether or not Don wants to pay for both.
[laughter]
Speaker 4: I sent you six pallets of tile.
Speaker 3: No, I think it’s things like that that have been helpful today for sure. I’ve got a better understanding of how it gets installed which then helps me design the test in the laboratory to help replicate that.
Speaker 1: Good. My ultimate takeaway was a list of do’s and don’ts from a contractor’s side. I do think that we have done that. From my standpoint, I think there’s some good things learned. The two centimeter and the ability to bear a load was impressive. The bedding choices that we had I think were impressive. The jointing sand options that we played with, that was all good for me. I’m ultimately happy with at least that. Pat had essentially a recipe for success in addition to the dos and don’ts but also to reduce contractor losses and increase the overall quality of insulation which I think, as a contractor, if I can make money at it, I’m going to continue to do it. If I do it and lose money, I’m not going to do anymore. As an industry, if the contractors are putting it in and it’s not good, it’s not going to continue to sell itself. Eventually, it’s just going to die on the [?]. I think those were two extremely important points. Reducing contractor losses and increasing overall quality should almost be the mission statement for it. How do we feel about that, Pat? Did you get what you needed to take something away from this?
Speaker 2: Definitely.
Speaker 1: Giovanni had a way to continue the porcelain counsel for the industry, what’s next I think is what it was. Where do we go from here? The things that we accomplished are good. Francesco has offered to do the summer meeting because that’s a moderate climate and you are going to do the winter meeting because that’s Florida which is good. We appreciate you guys hosting those.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: Thank you, yes, we’re all looking forward to visiting you, both.
Speaker 1: I would love to see the plants. Love to see the facility, the production how it’s made. I am very familiar with clay, I’m very familiar with concrete pavers, porcelain. I think we had talked a little bit, what’s the shrinkage that takes place? Is it zero? For a fired product that was crazy.
Speaker 2: Shrinkage, porcelain zero?
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 1: From raw material to fire to end product, how much shrinkage?
Speaker 4: Oh, that shrinkage is a lot.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 5: Oh, is it a lot?
Speaker 4: Yes, between the green and the fire there’s significant change.
Speaker 2: Yes, percentage wise?
Speaker 4: After express? From the time it goes through [?]
Speaker 2: Yes, how much percent?
Speaker 3: 5%.
Speaker 2: 5%?
Speaker 4: 5%.
Speaker 5: I was going to say six but okay.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: That means you struck [?].
Speaker 4:[?] have that thing.
Speaker 3: Give me that bottle.
Speaker 4: Yes right, sorry it’s just [crosstalk].
Speaker 1: Do we have a track that we’re willing to take? A next something, obviously we’re not setting dates or anything like that today, but have we decided that there’s a need to go forward with it? Is this something that people can benefit from that can grow that can be sustainable?
Speaker 4: You were out of the room but Steven mentioned that taking the transcripts and having reprinted, getting the transcripts to everybody, probably in a week to 10 days or two weeks, whatever and then everybody taking the transcript, looking at it, rereading and adding other notes, and then making suggestions as to the next move to this after we take a look at the transcripts. We may choose to bring other professionals into the circle to add to what we’ve done to further it and broaden what we’re trying to do.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, we identified a need for other people to come in. Like you said contractors, the jointing guys I don’t know, the rail system guys. Is there a need to have other people start to enter the meeting on an invitation?
Speaker 2: I believe so but again I don’t want to throw the doors open, turn it into this bizarre where everyone is hawking their goods. I think, just like we started this meeting, if we’re going to expand and invite people in, we need to be select. Pick someone with a type of product that we discussed today and say, “Okay come in, be part of this so we can continue our development.” One thing as far as my involvement, I love what we did here but moving forward, we kind of need a support organization to be organizing this thing and maintaining this information. I don’t know if TCMA is available to manage this little group and deal with the bookkeeping in other words, dealing with all the information and stuff.
Speaker 5: I’m not sure that that’s– not really a decision I would make.
Speaker 2: No, I absolutely know you can’t make it.
Speaker 5: I’m not sure that we have the staff available to do that, just because of the size of our organization and the number of things that we take on. I’m glad to take it back and toss it around the room, we have a meeting every Friday, are we getting back in time for that? I think that would be my concern and as it relates to installations specific issues. It’s something we typically participate in but we’re not always leading that effort. We’re allowing the people that do that work to lead that effort. I think that’s probably what our recommendation would be but like I said, I’ll be happy to take that back.
Speaker 3: Again, we’re going to be leading the product specification side of this pretty heavily over the next several months. That’s going to be our involvement is doing the testing in our lab, to versing with the participants of the study and other manufacturers to try and develop the criteria around this. We’ll be forming that side of things, I think during–
Speaker 4: Well what we have to do is look for some support from a bigger organization I think to organize and move forward so that would be probably our next step.
Speaker 1: Which can be more than one?
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 1: Preferably somebody if not TCNA, that would be the ideal one because we’re talking about your product. Somebody related within the hardscape industry, with that something that you think is right or not and get more than one party– I’m not talking about, let me rephrase that. Somebody has an interest in a porcelain paver that is in the hardscape industry that has a capability of helping with their organization, being one or two or three companies. Were you looking in terms of one particular company only to take on?
Speaker 2: No, I have my ideas wide open, unbounded.
Speaker 4: I think just identifying the need for is the first thing.
Speaker 1: We can probably bounce these ideas, I have some ideas that I need to first check with some people that I know have an interest, they have expressed an interest already, that I know that are able to come in and help. I don’t know that we want to let them just lead the way by themselves.
Speaker 2: Yes, the content of discussion is based on the people who are present and providing the organizational skills to bring meetings together and that sort of stuff. I’m not looking for leadership. I don’t think we’re looking for any leadership. We’re just looking for support.
Speaker 1: Support? All right.
Speaker 5: When you say support what’s the main thing you’re looking for?
Speaker 2: Main thing I think we’re looking for is a central place to say, “Okay, we need to have a meeting. Let’s pick the location that makes sense whether it’s down in Tennessee or wherever try to organize, put out the invites.” More of a meeting and events support is more what I would say is what we’re looking for. I’m not looking to create a new association; dear God I belong to enough. I don’t want to increase my heartburn rate, but I think it would be best done by an organization’s already in contact with all the major players.
Speaker 5: That’s helpful, that helps narrow down the scope.
Speaker 2: Yes, I can’t say that we’re looking for anything more at this time.
Speaker 5: In the future, do you anticipate that these are in-person meetings, teleconferences?
Speaker 2: We get a lot of our work done today on conference calls. When you have a specific task it’s very easy to do that on a conference call or a video call. When you are in development stage that didn’t work for shit. I would say that both would provide. Our physical meetings can provide the kind of the bullet point effort to task groups that we need to deal with. The task groups can typically do this over the phone. The last thing I want to do is hop on an airplane, fly off for a half-day meeting and something that could’ve gotten done on the phone. Someone’s got to deal with the transcripts and deal with the distribution of information, somebody who’s organized like engineering types.
[laughter]
Speaker 5: Again, this is just from our side typically the groups that we participate in there isn’t recording and transcribing and things of that nature. People are responsible for taking their own notes and having their own agenda items that they need to follow up on, so this is one of the first meetings I’ve participated in where it’s been recording in transcripts to be.
Speaker 2: Well this is the first meeting and there’s a lot of industry fear on what was happening here so to be totally open we wanted to make sure that somebody wants to listen to all these hours of our jokes and bodily noises, so be it.
Speaker 4: I thought that.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: You’re tired than I thought you were. Hopefully what we’ve done here today is get past some of those fears that many companies had about what we were doing here. We just want to be able to have input into helping create specifications for installation that will help grow the industry.
Speaker 1: That’s really all that has to be said. Until we get to a point where we’re comfortable and somebody really wants to be a part of it, has something that is really worth adding to what we’re doing-
Speaker 2: Show up at the meeting.
Speaker 1: They’re going to step up to the plate and they’re going to contribute.
Speaker 2: This is very fresh.
Speaker 3: I would expect this to snowball.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 5: The last two weeks, how many requests came in and how many people?
Speaker 2: A few abandoned ships.
Speaker 5: A few abandoned ships, yes, absolutely. When we started, there was a fear that we wanted to set standards for the product, which we can’t. That’s your job to do, and we were very clear on that. I heard that from one of the manufacturers that backed out. Well, we don’t need to shop. There are already standards on the product. I said, “Well, that’s great.” We understand that. That’s not what we’re doing.
Then the interest somewhat came back in and it was too late because then they understood what was going to be done. I hope that another reason for recording, they can hear it. It’s going to be on the public. It’s strictly on the installation side we need to set the standards. That’s [?].
Speaker 2: I would like to find a way for us to think about a next face to face meeting, try to make a decision what our potential focus points are that we want to work on specific. Narrow down, so as we leave this meeting, I want to make sure that we have in our mind maybe or start considering what our next handful of priorities are.
There’s a million things we can do, but I think with a lack of resources and this fledgling effort that we should stay very narrow-focused and think about if you were going to select three things that you think is important for this group to consider, we can put those altogether, send them out, vote on them.
Speaker 5: Do we want to put a timeline without a timeline where we don’t let this thing go for another year and it dies? Six months, three months, two months, we should be able to reconvene again. No particular date, but somewhat of a time that we know that listen, we have to keep moving, so we have-
Speaker 1: I am half serious with visiting Kronos in Florida down in Tennessee to see the facility and doing that mid-summer. It wasn’t a joke, but it wasn’t also-
Speaker 4: No, it was not a joke.
Speaker 1: I think that six months out or five months out, whatever we decide, and if they can wrap it around a production type of thing, it might be nice. That’s all.
Speaker 4: June?
Speaker 3: Not July. We’ll be in [?].
Speaker 5: I was also going to say not July. It could probably be in [?] that are typically in the summertime.
Speaker 1: August is six months. I think six months totally reasonable.
Speaker 2: We’re going to shoot loosely for August, and you get start honing in on dates [?].
Speaker 5: Okay. We can focus to develop something for that time.
Speaker 4: That’s enough time and we can help with whatever we want.
Speaker 2: We’ll look for some ideas for August for the PPC to reconvene. We also need to consider who else we want to bring in.
Speaker 1: I don’t expect a tour of your facility.
[laughter]
Speaker 5: We don’t want to send nothing.
Speaker 2: You stay here, we’re all going in.
Speaker 5: See you guys later.
Speaker 4: You need just to take when we are in production with the extra thick material because now, we are producing the material in March. That means probably we are going to go into production again in June/July, June [crosstalk] or August, because I want to show you the 2CM.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, the production.
Speaker 5: According to when we are going into production because we are not producing 2CM anymore. We do campaign. Now, we are going production in March, and then we’re going probably or before July or after July. It is August which is fine. If it’s going to be June, you see us in June. What do you think?
Speaker 6: There are enough process changes you campaign it, so you don’t have to change back.
Speaker 4: Or keep us informed so at least we can prepare for it. We’ll be meeting in Tennessee for the second meeting. Possibly Italy on the third if everybody’s up for it. We can probably arrange that.
Speaker 1: I think that speaks Giovanni’s takeaway, your goal of continuing our efforts on this.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Is that a consensus that we want to continue with the PPC?
Speaker 1: If it’s a show of hands, then let it be a record that we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 o of 10. Agreed. Did you raise your hand, Norton?
Speaker 2: He did. [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: To explain, I was thinking through PPC and just thinking through whether we are simply a group of people assembling to discuss an issue, or if this is some type of official organization.
Speaker 4:Oh, dear God, no.
Speaker 3: That’s my fear, is that there are a lot of things that need to be addressed.
Speaker 4: Let’s address it simply. It’s a group of people that have similar interests. It is not an organization, nor will it become one from my perspective,
Speaker 3: Maybe the main PPC. I don’t have a suggestion, but-
Speaker 4: I had nothing better.
Speaker 3: I don’t have a better name, but if it’s not meant to be official, changing the name may be something we want to consider so people don’t feel concerned that something’s happening without them being involved.
Speaker 7: Criminal’s hands.
Speaker 1: I would say, to be vague about it, then you simply call it PPC. That stands for whatever.
Speaker 2: I’m not going to get upset about that unless you’ve got a better name and it’s [?] PPC.
Speaker 4: Your fear is that if we call it a Porcelain Paper Council, that that becomes something but if it is simply just a PPC-
Speaker 3: I think there are things that people equate with that. People will hear about the Power Council and then either, a, feel like it is some shoot off of that or that it is equivalent to for this particular-
Speaker 2: Well, and that’s an issue in the tile industry, I would assume because we don’t use the word council in the concrete industry ever. Just call it a working group or something, industry working group.
Speaker 3: Yes, and something like that might be fine and again, when I get back to the office and we discuss this whole event coordination type situation, maybe there’s something that can be
Speaker 2: If you’re helping us there’s no sense in us ignoring your suggestions either. Hint, hint.
[laughter]
Speaker 3: I am persistent.
Speaker 2: Yes, so am I, but I’ve got more experience.
Speaker 5:Again, to answer that, that’s why this is being put out, so everybody to see what the intentions are. If we have to have a slogan for the company, for the council, for the PPC, where it’s going to stay strictly installation or helping the industry to whatever so people can understand, that can possibly be done.
Speaker 2: Don’t give in so easy. Quit bending over. This is not county jail.
[laughter]
Speaker 5: Yes, right?
Speaker 1: Alright, so in moving forward, I think Phil was the big winner for his takeaway. Phil was looking for a two-centimeter focus for dry set installation standards. I think we made leaps and bounds in that specific area.
Speaker 3: What a joy, he did two-centimeter and not breaking it.
Speaker 1: I think that went well. I don’t think there’s a need to labor on that. We’ve already hit that fairly well. Dave was looking for standards for individual tests affecting pedestal applications similar to wind, uplift, fire. We’ve mentioned briefly seismic. You were looking for one test.
Speaker 4: Yes, something like that, because the other thing is when you do a wind-uplift test, there’s the pedestals and there’s the porcelain paver. What blows off first is going to be the porcelain paver and then the pedestals come. As the pedestal manufacturer, it’s like who’s responsible for what, when and where?
Speaker 7: The funny thing is first, as the deckchairs [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Speaker 1: You got architects saying, “We want to see it with the wind up, with this and that, what time you install it, what’s the installation process for installing the porcelain paver, I did the pedestal to get a window.”
Speaker 3: Is this wind up with infatuation, for lack of a better word, is it a hypothetical or are they’re becoming [?]
Speaker 4: We can thank our good friends WASA. They made concrete papers that are heavier than our porcelain tiles.
Speaker 5:[?]
Speaker: Yes. Once our porcelain tiles showed up and they were much better looking, they started figuring out ways to break the tile. One thing, they just started actually breaking it with drop tests. Number two-
Speaker 6: They actually wanted [?] material.
Speaker 5: Number two, they created a hypothetical horror movie of tiles blowing off a rooftop. A tile has never blown off a rooftop. Been around New York City for five, six years, high-rises, never blown off. Under so many factors, with the higher the parapet wall, the angle of the wind, the width of the joint, what site amenities are on top of the tiles, there’s a million things that impact it. If you had a six-inch parapet wall and nothing but tile and nobody’s on there and it’s just tile loosely set on pedestal, a 130-mile/hour sustained wind, maybe. [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: Really, [?] question of when a hurricane comes through, and that’s really about it.
Speaker 5: Yes, except for the fact that WASA and [?] relationships with the designer, architectural design community, and they have gone around and shown everybody this video of tiles blowing off. It exists in the minds of architects now. It would be nice if as an industry, and I totally agree with you, we could come up with a way to change the narrative.
Speaker 2: The requires a lot of [?] A lot of, not hypotheticals, but actual testings. You got to get the movie companies out there with their huge-ass fans.
Speaker 5: Let’s say Florida International University is the wall of wind. [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: Do they have that? [crosstalk]
Speaker 3:[?] information out about that. A guy out at– He was with [?] for now in British Columbia, Vancouver. [?] he did quite a bit of research because the rooftop– You can go to Vancouver right now and there’s 30 cranes in there. The high-rises in Vancouver and every building there has porcelain on the top of it. It is an issue there.
Speaker 1: I’m just saying, it’s like [?] has theirs [?] we pass the wind up and let [?]
Speaker 4: How did they get [?] What exactly is it?
Speaker 6: It’s like do we go-
Speaker 3: To Toronto.
Speaker 2: There’s no way for a pedestal to pass the test unless something’s attached to it. You can’t test the pedestal.
Speaker 4: In these situations where the pedestal’s typically-
Speaker 1: Mounted.
Speaker 4: -mounted in some way-
Speaker 6: They are now glued and tacked on in.
Speaker 4:[?] through the roof?
Speaker 1: Yes, which makes the waterproofing a little bit dicey, doesn’t it?
[laughter]
Speaker 2: You went through that?
Speaker 3: They do have a wire membrane that goes on top that typically they’re glued to.
Speaker 1: Right. Typically, but–
Speaker 4: I mean except for Carlisle, Firestone, and all those that are manufacturers of rookie membranes. Those are the ones that will then say, “You can put it on our membrane.” Now you go and you put it out on a roof, and you put that, glue it, a membrane from theirs, now they voided the warranty that’s on that roof. There’s a lot of things to consider on this too.
Speaker 3: If we can find other suppliers or manufacturers or installers, a pedestal that can help, you’re open for that because we are trying to fix the industry practice. This isn’t about a particular product. If that is the case and it’s the case with everybody here for the industry, I have a couple of people that have been doing extensive work with the pedestals and we can test them.
Speaker 2: On the high roof?
Speaker 3: Yes, and in California. We’ll get some information on those and if everybody thinks that will be fit to have them in the next meeting, I’ll talk to them first and then we’ll put it on and email everybody, everybody votes.
Speaker 2: I think one person would be great.
Speaker 3: Yes, one person, just one person.
Speaker 1: From the installation side?
Speaker 3: Yes, on both. They’re there. They did lots of different tests. They passed lots of different tests in [?] porcelain, complete and they do a lot of the porcelain. I think that I’m going to talk with them first and then we’ll shoot out an email to the group whenever it’s that time, and let’s see what you guys think. I think they would be very valuable to listen to what they have to say, because they’re a very pro porcelain, pedestal company.
Speaker 4:[?] you mentioned fire a couple of times. What– As Don has already mentioned–
Speaker 3: I said it a couple of times and it has to do more with the pedestals than it is with the porcelain.
Speaker 4: As Don has mentioned, we burn it pretty good already.
Speaker 3: It’s more on the pedestal, pedestal side.
Speaker 2: Listen, if the pedestal’s melting, the roof is on fire. You got other issues.
Speaker 3: Same things if the tiles are blowing off the roof. [?] gone bad.
[laughter]
[crosstalk]
Speaker: Usually it’s just a bunch of different things that have been thrown out there [?] different, other manufacturers. That’s why it was brought up.
Speaker 1: Lastly, Jose, takeaway was information to take back to these contractors which I would hope-
Speaker 2: What do you got? What did you get?
Speaker 6: Open gridded base really is the best method. I think we all figured it was the best method for installation especially on [crosstalk].
Speaker 2: Open gridded bedding or open gridded base?
Jose: Open gridded bedding.
Speaker 2: That’s one of the things that people get confused and we start interchanging the terminology. We got bedding, we got base. Base could be multiple layers.
Speaker 1: At your yard, do you ever do any contractor educational seminars?
Speaker 6: We’ve done them for pedestal installs. Never really done them for just a dry [?]
Speaker 1: Would you consider doing that?
Speaker 6: Definitely.
Speaker 1: That’s interesting. Good [crosstalk]
Speaker 3: What about a direct bonding location?
Speaker 6: I’ve taken customers to dry bond installations where they do it with– not with porcelain yet, but I would like to see one done with porcelain properly.
Speaker 3: You mean a direct bond with porcelain done properly?
Jose: Yes.
Speaker 3: Not necessarily dry bond.
Jose: Yes.
Speaker 3: Would you change any of the things that you’ve done regarding compaction with what you saw today?
Speaker 6: I’d compact the porcelain.
[laughter]
Typically, like we all said, everybody’s afraid of compacting a three-quarter-inch porcelain so seeing the video, recording it and just being able to send and show everybody, it can be done if installed properly. Just give it a shot.
Speaker 3: You have the proper equipment.
Speaker 6: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Don’t forget the packing blanket and the rope.
Speaker 4: Yes, the blanket.
Speaker 2: The rope.
Speaker 4: You got to have that blanket. [?] no good.
[laughter]
Let’s make a model of that blanket.
Speaker 3:[?]
Speaker 1: I don’t necessarily want to wrap up the meeting, but we did put on the agenda that it was four o’clock end time. [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: Everybody out.
[laughter]
Speaker 1: By all means, we can sit here and continue to talk. I have no issues with that. If you guys want to, that’s fine. I went through expectations. Went through whether we met them or not. We’ve gone through the agenda. The last item on there would be material applications, limitations. I think we actually addressed that throughout the day. After that, if there is anything else specific– Steve, you called it. You tell me if you’re ready to end it.
Steve 2: We could continue on. I would just say the formal part of this discussion, you’ve gone through and got what we wanted to get through that discussion. I want to just thank everybody who participated today, because I think it brings us further forward to helping the industry grow. I have no background of love for porcelain. It’s growing, trust me. [chuckles] My customers, for hardscapes, this is going to be a huge component of what they do moving forward. I can see–
The concrete companies, Oldcastle and others are going to go, “Shit.” It’s true. New materials, learning how to use them, teaching people how to do them. One of the worst things that ever happened I think in the concrete industry is that they didn’t embrace other materials, textures, and things like that. They were manufacturers so they were in the concrete business and they never wanted to go beyond that.
I understand that, but unfortunately, they lost a broader view, I think, of what it could be. Hardscape contractors have now reached out beyond concrete, gone to natural stone, going to porcelain, and adding all sorts of great new things to their offering. Thank God the creativity that I see today blows me away. That absolutely blows me away.
Speaker 1: Is there a market for porcelain countertops for the outdoor? 30-inch by– I think you would even talk about tiles that were 30 going to be three-foot by– one meter by three meters, I mean.
Speaker 5: In Italy we’re making five feet by ten feet.
Speaker 4: I was going to say tiles–
Speaker 3: Tiles that are quarter inch?
Speaker 5: Up to 15.
Speaker 3: three-quarter inches.
Speaker 4: 15 [?]
Speaker 1: From three millimeters thick all going up to-
Speaker 5: 2CM.
Speaker 4: 2CM and I think even larger.
Speaker 3: The technology that produces the tiles is not the same technology that made six-by-sixes and 12-by-12’s in years past. It’s just a different kind of technology. It’s capable of making these large slabs.
Speaker 1: With the ability to image the surface–
Speaker 4: Make it look like whatever we want.
Speaker 1: Yes. You can pick anything you want. That could in turn become an inventory item for hardscape yards who are selling kitchens as well. If you can give the guys a slab that’s affordable and it’s a material they’re already working with, it seems like it would-
Speaker 2: What’s your cost per square foot on a big piece?
Speaker 6: I don’t know. We don’t make them local.
Speaker 5: Just to give you an idea, out of Italy you had a 2CM material, big like 96-by-48, is going to be around 85 US dollar per square meter. It means that-
Speaker 1: $8 and [crosstalk] $8 in change per square foot.
Speaker 3: You said eight and change per square foot?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: I was going to say 8 to 10 on the high end probably.
Speaker 1: 86?
Speaker 4:[?] is a natural stone. Cheaper than granite, cheaper than marble.
Speaker 1: It’s a tenth of the cost of granite.
Speaker 3: It lives outside better than anything. It’s so nonporous, you can sit there with your knife and fork and you eat your steak off it. When you’re done, you can sharpen your knife on the [?] table.
Speaker 5:[?] dollars?
[laughter]
[?] Sometimes.
Speaker 2: I think we all know our customers are looking for new products and new potential. Porcelain provides that today. Hopefully, there’ll be more stuff in the future. Obviously, the porcelain can fill a lot of builds, offer that variety of material and texture and color to jobs. What we see with concrete, even the best of the concrete fades.
Speaker 1: That’s good to know. That technology is here in the United States. We can use that [?].
Speaker 5: No. [?] so we have the same possibility here in the states, [?] understand. If you are able to produce for one [?] because our standout is to produce [?] production [?] If we are able to achieve this quantity in America, [?]
Speaker 1: It’s not a shelf life issue, it’s just an importing demand.
Speaker 2: Production-made, you got to run along production-made.
Speaker 1: If you’re running a month worth of material, you don’t want to have it sit in the yard for three years.
Speaker 3: It’ll be out faster than two. The tile industry isn’t the fashion industry is a fashion industry, but it changes. Granite and marble [?] people are always looking for that look out of that product. For tile, I think we’re always looking for different looks.
Speaker 1: It really is just a half notch below the true fashion industry.
Speaker 5: Of course, talking about countertops, talking about outdoor application material has a long life, more long life than the standard tile, which means again more fashion. I’m looking what they want for countertops. They want calacatta. They used to want calacatta 10 years ago and now. The same [?], the same materials, I think. This is what I think.
Material is more durable. [?] material for countertops and [?] are more durable for sure. It is a less risky investment for our side. The problem is again, we need to be able to sell a month of production.
Speaker 3: I don’t have anything.
Speaker 2: Whether we drink beer and have bourbon then, we certainly can do that, I don’t know what anybody’s plans are for tonight. We’re all here. Everyone’s here for the night except you guys are–
Speaker 1: Except us, yes. We’re going to [?]
Speaker 2: No problem.
Speaker 5: I’m trying to catch the flight tonight to [?].
Speaker 2: Good luck with that.
Speaker 5: I’m trying to.
[laughter]
Speaker 3: Back in Chicago again?
Speaker 5: Yes. I’m going to Chicago then to Nashville.
Speaker 4: Anywhere– You were ten o’clock?
Speaker 5: Ten o’clock, yes.
Speaker 4: You should be able to make it on time.
Speaker 1: Should be.
[laughter]
Speaker 2: I think we should let you get underway, so you have a good chance to catch your flight. Anybody who’s stuck here tonight, if you want to meet at the hotel at a certain time, if you want to eat there or somewhere else-
Speaker 1: Blue Sombrero.
Speaker 2: Yes, Blue Sombrero.
Speaker 4:? Blue Sombrero.
Speaker 5: We’re having dinner there.
Speaker 6: Are you guys are still down here, I’ll pick up two [?]
Speaker 2: Yes. I think– There should– [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Thank you.
Speaker 3: No worries.
Speaker 2: You did great for us.
Speaker 4: Very nice to meet you.
Speaker 5: Was a pleasure to have you. [crosstalk]
[laughter]
[crosstalk]
Speaker 2: Jose, have you got used compactors [crosstalk]
Speaker 6: The [?] that were taken, one was going to be a demo, and the other one’s going to be just [?] the two managers there [?] [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: We’ve got the designs [?] thrown it back at the [?] We’ll have it first [?] prototype [?] [crosstalk] The difference you won’t be able to use the handle and stuff for-because we’ve changed that because we don’t want to use the small frame [?] on the heavy plates so we changed that because we’re only doing 16-by-16 and six and a half. [crosstalk] Pretty much, that’s going to be a two-man lift. [crosstalk] -a machine. [crosstalk] We’ve had people bastardise? the machine to do that. [background conversations]
[01:29:04] [END OF AUDIO]