[Robert Connolly]

Hello.

There are a family of stones out there being sold for kitchen countertops which are very high in mica. According to my searching it’s also called “schist”. I don’t know the names of them all, but one color is named Saturnia.

If you’re not familiar with this type of stone, it essentially crumbles apart, doesn’t hold glues (polyester resin, or CA/Krazy glue) well, is very soft, and is a nightmare to polish because it will be riddled with holes and chips.

The stone is porous, but the crumbs which make up the stone are not porous, and so glues don’t penetrate and hold very well. I have tried saturating edges with thin CA glue and it was better, but still bad.

As a rule, the more you try to fill an edge with glues, the worse it gets.

I have asked my boss to just spray the entire job with lacquer, but he won’t.

The top surface of the slabs are well polished, so there must be a way to do this.

My shop uses CNC machines, which help, but the pieces come out of the CNC chipped and pitted because the stone crumbles apart, and we end up redoing the polish by hand. We are of course using low speed tools with this stuff.

Can any of you offer some advice on how to get a good edge with this material, aside from spraying the whole thing with clear paint?

[Andy Graves]

We had the same issue. Tried the soaking the edge but it made it worse because when we machined the edge it would break off where the penetrating adhesive had penetrated.

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