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Posts
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Whew, I spent hours tonight replying to a thread about sealing stone. Here is a link to it, an interesting read and shows how the marketing fight is between multi material shops and stone only shops.
ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg0805524423900.html
Here is the long winded reply I gave after being called dumb and ignorant. Not nice to treat a lady like this, but she was no lady……
Sigh…….
Stonegirl, I had such high hopes that you might be different than the other stone only shops that spread such missinformation.
Okay, let’s take your post apart for the education of these fine readers.
Lets start off why stonegirl likes to call me mr cabinet, disregarding that I fabricate stone as well as other types of countertop materials. She is trying to discredit what information that I post, because she can’t attack the info directly, so she attacks the poster. Another poster a few weeks ago, linked to a story done on my shop by Surfaces Magazine,a national trade publication, which covers stone, quartz, granite, marble as well as laminate and exotic material countertops of all types. They did the story because of my involvement in another site that covers fabrication issues on all types of materials, that site is packed with the industries best fabricators and best minds and is read by executives of all the major players in the business like Corin, Hanwah, Silestone, as well as granite suppliers, stone consumable suppliers and stone tooling companies.
The fuss about my posts from the stone only fabricators is because of the shift from shops doing only one material to shops doing all materials. The old style stone shops that did such poor quality work because they were the only game in town (stonegirl has refered to this in other posts) are losing market share to the multi material shops. Go over to stoneadvice.com and read about the inroads that new shops are making into their markets and listen to them moaning and groaning.
What is good about this is that it has brought about competition, lowering prices while quality is going up, one heck of a deal for consumers.
Look at it this way, if you have been certified in solid surface, you look at the average granite seam and shudder, thinking that no way you will get paid for such an ugly seam, so the newer shops have lead the way in improving seam quality. Even the SFA, Stone Fabricators Alliance says there is a struggle between the MIA, the older trade organization for stone and the SFA, who like the multi material shops, is wanting to raise quality levels way above what the MIA recomends as industry standards.
Quality costs money to produce. A old line shop can cut a seam, grind down the seam edges to get rid of the chips to the MIA allowed tolerance and set the seam with a certain amount of lippage and get away with it cause it meets industry standards. I don’t know about others, but it takes me about an hour to dress a seam to fit my standard of what a granite seam should look like in a soft stone like Santa Cecelilla, two to three hours in a hard stone like Absolute Black, if you are lucky and don’t spall the seam edge when drawing it together to check the fit. We use the razor blade test, if a razor blade will stand up but not drop down int the seam, you are done. This will leave a seam that will be hard, very hard, to photograph from two feet away. With Gorrilla grips and some Integra glue for the seam, it will be as perfect as a seam as possible, so much so that people no longer care so much that there are seams or where they are. Plus, a tight seam is more sanitary and less prone to fail later on, the stone being stronger than the glue on flaking. A properly dressed seam doesn’t have those tiny triangles of glue that fill in the chipping and flaking from the saw blade that cuts the joint.
Then that tight, level seam gets top polished, which when the seam is done properly takes only twenty minutes to do very well. The resulting seam is flat, your dishes don’t catch on it, and the seam adhesive holds up better because it is flush, so it doesn’t get the wear and tear of one of the old style seams that you can feel with your hand.
So we spend more time and money doing the job, make less money on the job than one of the older shops, but we make it up in customer satisifaction and referals.
Another thing brought about by the entry of mulit material shops is resining. A shop selling quartz, solid surface or laminate isn’t going to put a granite full of pitts and fissures in your home, while a stone shop won’t think twice, they have done it for years and to say it is a good thing is to say their previous work is substandard.
Having a resin filled surface is really closer to quartz or solid surface resins, which we multi material shops know how to polish to avoid burning the resin and “pop” the shine so it matches the top of the counter. Go over to one of the many stone sites and read what they say about quartz, many hate the stuff as it is taking business from them. Some call it “stink and foam” because of the foam it makes in their coolant water and the smell a resin makes when you cut and grind it.
So thanks to the multi material shops, you now have a choice of better seams, better quality surface and better polishing on resined slabs because of the expereince and quality levels of solid surface and quartz shops.
There is more professionalism in the multi material shops as well, better equipment because some of the same machines that work quartz can work granite, with minor tooling changes. Of course the famous Gorilla grips are made by Monument Tool Works, a solid surface equipment manufacturer. Plus more focus on training, safe material handling, marketing and customer service. Multi material shops are businesses used to pleasing customers, not stone masons getting by with their old ways of working stone.
We are not set in our ways, like so many “experts” and will try new methods and materials and aren’t embarrased to ask for advice. This is less about craftmanship and more about new technology and business men creating a new way to please a customer and make money in the process.
Solid surface and quartz both have long, very long, warranties paid for by the manufactures. As a result, these manufacturers won’t sell unless you are certified by their training dept and sign an agreement to follow their fabrication rules to the letter. After all, if the product fails, consumers look to the company that offered the long warranty, not the shop that sold them the top. The brands will even inspect your shop to see that you have the proper tooling and equipment needed to do a decent job. However, if a fabricator doesn’t follow the rules, and the top fails as a result, the fabricator is responsible for the repair or replacement costs, so fabricators that survive tend to follow rules and stay on top of quality.
In comparison, no ne has to be certified to work or sell stone. You yourself could open a shop and start buying slabs next week if you wanted to. The tools are cheap, a five hundred bucks will get you started if you don’t mind burning up the tools and getting by, or spend five to ten thousand like we did and get by better, but spend more labor on the process. There is no warranty with granite, and what few I have seen offered by stone fabricators are so full of exclusions and holes to be near worthless, so there is no risk to a new stone fabricator. In fact, many new shops are started by a stone fabricator after only a short time of working in an established shop.
Where this makes a difference to consumers is in quality and most importantly, in the information you will be given prior to the sale. It is night and day…..
For a shop like ours, stone is a small but important part of our total business. We will not risk our reputation on selling a counter without disclosing every possible risk that the customer is taking by going with stone. We are used to educating consumers and managing their expectations, if not, we might get hit with a warranty complaint. A granite top might be one fourth or less of a good cabinet job, and if you piss off the customer over quality of the stone job, or if it stains, cracks or doesn’t perform as the customer expects, you lose the entire recomendation on the entire job.
So, we tell you everything you need to know about the pluses and minuses of all products, after all, we just want your business and could care less which product you pick for the countertop.
So that is what stonegirl, paulines and others are doing their best to prevent, competition for business and keeping consumers ignorant of the shortcomings of their only product.
What a long winded start to this reply, but it shows why granite information causes such volitile threads, much is at stake. Now let’s take apart the fallacies in stonegirls post.
Stonegirl wrote ” I would LOVE to know where you get your info. How do you figure a stone shop sells more stone because they do not seal it? Does the stone disintegrate and the h/o need to replace a worn through piece of stone? OMG – that is just the most ignorant statement you have made thus far. Bacteria colonizing the stone with no sealer? No wait – THIS could be the dumbest thing you said. Or no… In another thread you stated more bacteria got killed on granite because more grew there. That statement has to take the cake. ” End quote…..
Go over to stoneadvice.com, a stone fabricator site, go to the “ask an expert” page and search for sealing stone threads. You will find that there are two camps, those who warn and encourage consumers to seal and those who say few stones need sealing. Some of the pro sealer crowd sell sealer (duh!) and others are stone fabricators that just want to warn about staining issues. The other side of the fight is the anti sealing fabricators that say telling people to seal shows a weakness in their product that is hurting sales. This is what I refered to when I said that some stone sellers will minimize the need to seal because who want a product in your home that needs a lot of maintance or is so likely to stain that you need a protective top coat? Stonegirl morphs this into some kind of rant about stone disinigrating, which by the way studies have proven that it does open up fissures and flake as it ages, plenty of proof availiable online I can point out if she wants to debate the point.
Then the name calling starts, calling me ignorant and dumb, which is against the rules here, but no matter, it just shows her lack of character and lack of debate skills, as well as knowing that he evidence is against her in this matter. What better method of attack can she use if the logic and facts are against her?
Then she claims that thinking stone harbors bacteria is ignorant and says that it is the dumbest thing I said. Here is a link to a NASA funded study on the number of bacteria present in ordinary rock, I believe this particular rock was in a desert region, New Mexico or Arizona, and the study was part of NASA’s research toward finding life on other planets. Here is the link to the study :
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1449054
Here is a link that touches on the species of bacteria present in bedrock:
http://www.skb.se/default2____17358.aspx
So it is scientific fact, easily proven by a simple google search, that bacteria indeed colonize stone, in massive quanities, thus the need to sanitize regularly.
Now who is ignorant, stonegirl? I don’t really think that is the reason for your attack on my post, but your need to keep this information supressed lest it hurt your business.
Next stonegirl attributes a quote from last week, from Tom999 , a respected retired Kitchen Designer, about one of the two “studies” done for Peter Novelli, a public relation firm on behalf of a stainless steel group, the other being paid for by the Marble Institute to be used to market stone. I could write for several hours on why those press releases are so full of holes to be near useless, but will settle for saying that what Tom999 pointed out was true, that the study did count only the dead bacteria and claimed that the more killed by the disinfecting methods, the more sanitary the material was. Indeed a product that supported growth of bacteria will have the highest kill rate. Look at it this way, could you kill more roaches in your home, or in an abandoned home in New Orleans after Katrina? Is counting the dead roaches a fair test of the sanitary condition of the home?
So stonegirl can’t keep simple things straight like who posted what, and wants us to consider her arguements unimpeachable. Should she wish to debate the synder study, that Tom999 mentioned, I encourage her to start a thread for that purpose and I will oblige.
As to my education on stone, I spent about four years researching stone fabrication and sales before we got into it, have read most of the forums like stoneadvice.com and findstone.com from front to back, plus researching as many technical studies as I could find about stone and its suitablity for countertops. The geology of stone is boring, so I spent little time there, but I probally know more than stonegirl does about the fabricattion, care and cleaning and strengths and weaknesses of stone. I know enough not to start calling people out over things that I am ingnorant about, something stonegirl would benefit from were she to add it to her habits.
In addition to my reseach, I lead a group that conducted bacterial testing on granite, solid surface and quartz, and posted this online for review. I can show you a lot of proof that bacteri love granite and thrive in its crevices and pitts. Quartz did badly as well, which was not too suprising. Should stonegirl or paulines wish to debate this issue, I can provide counts and photographs of the tests to back this up. Oh, and in a few months, we should have this testing re done by some bio labs, just now getting quotes on the testing. I will keep you posted if you are interested…..
Next stonegirl wrote:
” Sealing a stone has nothing to do with the sanitation of it. The only effect a sealer has is to prevent liquids from penetratig the stone in order to prevent staining. For a lot of stones, the use of sealer is not necessary and I very seldom advise the use of sealer. NOT because I want to sell more stone, but because I am trying to save my clients the headaches of dealing with the results of unneeded sealer applications – ghost rings, ghost etches, sticky spots etc. etc. This would require a thorough knowledge of stone, its’ composition and characteristics. Things I have learned by long years of work experience and by listening to people with more knowledge than I have. Maurizio as a case in point: He probably has more knowledge about stone in his left hand pinky finger than I will ever know. What knowledge I have about the material our clients choose will be imparted to them, so that they know what they are preparing to buy and how to take care of it. ” End quote…….
Stonegirl infers that I said that sealing stone sanitizes it, which is not found in my post. What I said was that if you do sanitize your stone with approved methods, you will need to seal more often.
Then she claims what no sealer manufacture will claim, nor does the Marble Institute claim this, that sealing will “prevent” liquids from penetrating and staining stone. Note in the care and cleaning section of the Marble institute consumers resource section, it elaborates the need to “blot” spills, not wipe them, to avoid spreading the stain or forcing it into the stone. Then google the issue, you will find that reputable shops say that sealer will SLOW down the spill from penetrating, giving you time to minimize the accident or prevent it entirely by cleaning it up quickly. Poor choice of words, or just ignorant, to use one of her favorite words?
She does have a good point about Maurizio having more knowledge than she does, so there is a shred of humility left intact. The info about uneeded sealers on some stone is common knowledge, yawn, but she throws it in to prove her expertise in these matters so at least some good will come of this thread. New readers might not be aware of it.
She continues by stating that what she knows will be imparted to her customers, which I applaud, but wonder if she will repeat the scientific studies about bacteria colonizing granite, or the radiation issues covered by other posts, or will she keep that to herself? Perhaps stonegirl is ignorant of these issues and is a geniunely good person that just knows no better, so she lashes out? Only she can answer that one…..
She goes on to offer some good advice about sealing stone, yet she also says to not follow the manufacturers recomended procedures, which makes me wonder who has the most knowledge of the product, them or her. Personally, I would defer to experts who make their living making the sealer, but if her way works……
She does give good advice on cleaning products, you must use the recomended cleaning products if you want the sealer to survive very long, and pH levels are crucial. That leaves out common cleaning products like 409 and Windex that Maurizio says will pitt and spall some granites eventually.
Yet she neglects to mention that almost all sanitzing solutions will strip the sealer quickly, even the common weak vinegar/ water solution will do this according to the Marble Institute.
Finialy stonegirl writes :
” How long between sealer applications? Who knows? It varies from material to material and circumstance to circumstance. It could be never or once a year – just see when the stone starts absorbing liquids again.
Hope this helped a little. I know there are a lot of differing opinions on this, but there are also somefacts and I hope I covered a few to make things a little easier.” End quote….
At last a paragraph that I can agree with, well it should read “once a month to never”, but she is right about continually checking to see if the stone is absorbing water to see if it is time to reseal. However, some stones like Santa Cecillia will continue to soak up the sealer, so be prepared to put lots and lots of coats if you depend on the soaking in test. After all, sealer is a liquid, isn’t it?
Stonegirl then starts being generous and civil, allowing that there are other opinions. She doesn’t point out that she also thinks that differing opinions will get you labeled “dumb” and “ignorant”, even is she herself is ignorant of the facts underlying the opinions.
And of course paulines chimes in that her points are so perfect for the countertop FAQ, after all they both sell stone for a living.
The sorid fact of this thread is that some would prefer at all costs to shout down any opinion other than their own, and refuse in most cases to back up their “facts” with scientific studies as proof.
I am enjoying working stone, it isn’t that difficult, we use our entry level workers for a lot of it, as it is difficult to mess up, but it is a challenge to make a good solid top out of it and to prevent it from breaking. It demands your full attention and makes the day go by quickly. I like learning more about it and am an avid fan of stoneadvice.com and findstone.com, some good info can be found on both sites, especially if you read between the lines at times.
I hope this clears up some of the confusion about sealing granite, but the best advice is found at findstone.com and the marble institute.
Lots of fun things to do on a monday night…….
Ha! good one MIke.
No, but I get passionate when people try to oversell their product. A few threads later, a cancer survivor stated that she wants to avoid as much toxic solvents in her home as possible, scared to death of one of them causing cancer. What does this stonegirl do? Assures her that there is no danger in solvents. Thank goodness this fabricator is an expert on toxic materials and medical issues for cancer surviors.
Al, you need to condense all the stuff into a paragraph or two that you could generically insert on to the websites that start posting lies. It would accomplish the same thing, and would be a heck of alot less work for you. Copy and paste, Copy and paste.
Mike G wrote
Al,
Did you wite for a newspaper in your prior life?
I’m partly jealous that Al can type so well……..and stay on point. Way to go Al!
I unfortuneatly have the displeasure of dealing with “Stonegirl types” on a weekly basis. This person may not be any type of fabricator at all but an industry hired hack who is paid to do nothing more then spread bullspit and gloss over the problems with stone.
All,
More often than not I just don’t have the time for reading such along post. You are a accomplished writer and it is my opinion that you are also very informed on the topics of which you speak.
Respectfully,
Johnny C
Thanks all for the nice words. Yeah, way too long for any but the truly interested to read. Part of my therory is to bury them when I respond, use points in their post to expand. Sometimes, like this one, it starts with two paragraphs and when they jump on me, it turns into twenty.
I have sorta grown less anti stone and wandered into anti stone shop territory. Seems that the multi material shop will give straight answers to customers while the old stone shops spread the bull spit and mung, as Dave puts it.
I got a “friendly” warning from garden web today, warning not to bicker online. This after I get called ignorant and dumb. I haven’t checked, but I would bet that the post got deleted like the last one. These guys and girls are smart, when they can’t win, they start name calling, then one of them complains to the moderator and gets my posts yanked so the consumers can’t read the info.
Well, by complaining after they called me dumb and ignorant, lacking common sense and an “ass”, they got the post removed so others can not read the info.
I need a brave soul to do some copying and pasting and get some of that info back into play.
You have got to be kidding me Al !! Utter bullspit. I’d do it in a heart beat but quite frankly, don’t know how to. Someone here surely does.
check this out,
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg0809014213855.html?2657
I challenged them to a debate on this thread, but it got deleted by the moderator.
Al,
Nice rebuttal. I apologize for not chiming in, or completing the radiation study yet. Im in Gansu province, (Gobi desert)setting off dynamite charges and recodring them on a siesmograph for lack of a better term so these idiots know where to drill. The intructions are in english and they cant afford the more modern equipment. A bit out of my league, but I figued out how to do.Will be dong more of the same in Xinjiang Autonomous region next week.
Keep up the good work.
B Rgds,
Lenny
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