In times like these, you have to keep your eye on the ball, and stay focused on quality. If you quit paying attention to the end result, your work will become a fixture in the "Half Vast" club's hall of fame.
A recent project inspection that I did went from bad to far worse, left me scratching my head and begged for an opportunity to be shared with the readership of the Slippery Rock Gazette. I do thes e inspections via e-mail all the time, being able to resolve many issues with a review of pictures taken of the "issues" in question, and with a written summary of what the problem is, who is at fault, and what should be done to resolve the issue. This one qualifies for the "hall of shame" - since it was 100% avoidable.
For the record - I did not do this project. I was called in as an independent consultant to offer an "objective opinion" on the quality of the work of the project, and to offer "suggestions" as to what could and should have been done to rectify the situation.
I do these kinds of inspections for a living - both for fabricators and consumers. Since I have been in the trades for 33+ years, there is a lot I have seen over 3+ decades. I haven't seen it all yet, but I'm working on it. Just about the time I think that I've seen it all, I get exposed to a whole new situation that is hard to believe it got to where it did.
In the interest of fairness, I can not reveal who the fabricator is who actually did the work, and then attempted to fix the initial problem. (Heck, if I had done this fiasco, I sure wouldn't want my name associated with what happened). The stone - an Engineered Stone/ Quartz product, was blameless in the scenario. This whole thing was not - I say again, not a fault of the stone.
For the sake of argument, I'll call the fabricator "Brand X Stone." If he reads this article, he'll know who he is, and hopefully will see what kind of a mess he made - versus what he could have done.
Don't let this happen to you.
I'll call this episode "The Case of the Unfinished Edges."
OK, here's the gist: A customer orders and receives Engineered Stone/Quartz countertops for their kitchen from Brand X Stone. The job is templated, slabs are received at Brand X's shop, and fabrication is done.
The parts that make up the kitchen are made in the shop and shipped to the jobsite where they are promptly installed. However, this is where the initial problem rears its ugly head.
Upon completion by the install crew, the homeowner is complaining that the edge polish on half of the tops is not shiny at all, in fact, "It looks downright awful," (according to the homeowner's own words).
I was sent pictures of the kitchen, and they revealed that indeed, some of the edges and the profile on the countertops appear to have been shaped using a CNC router bit - stopping at position 1 or 2 - while other edges in the same kitchen are finished and polished very nicely. What gives?
According to the fabricator, "The CNC cutter gets worn and striations show more on quartz, and the color that was installed on this project."
What? So how does an edge on one piece of the kitchen look like nothing higher than a 50 grit pad has hit it, and another area looks like the polish went up to a 3,000 grit? This does not make sense to me.
As I look at the pictures, I can see that clearly, the edges that are unsatisfactory have been hit by a position 1, and maybe a position 2 router bit... period. No polish, just striations. It becomes clearly evident to me that the pieces with the bad edges were shipped before they were completed. Ray Charles could have seen this one from a mile away!
There was no polish on these edges, and the shop foreman who could have/should have caught this was "asleep at the wheel" when the Quality Control phase of the job was done in the shop prior to shipping and install.
My initial advice to the homeowner was to have the fabricator come back and remove the tops with the incomplete edges, take them back to Brand X's shop, where the polishing process could be completed under more ideal (and wet) conditions, then have the pieces re-installed. Then the job would be OK and everyone would be happy.
Well, this is not where the job and this dilemma ended. The fabricator decides to "insist" that the tops will not be removed, and that the incomplete edges will be dry ground, dry honed and dry finish polished in place in the kitchen over a finished wood floor.
"Is this guy taking crazy pills?" I asked. I went over all of the advantages and disadvantages to grinding and polishing the tops in place - both wet and dry - clearly advising my client of neither option (polish in place).
The best recommendation was that in the interest of the homeowner, the tops should be removed and polished wet - at Brand X's shop - not in the kitchen over a finished wood floor.
I think my exact words to the homeowner was to the effect, "If this were me, I'd be better off if I just went home and hanged myself rather than attempt to do the `fix' in place." If done dry, the dust would be everywhere. If done wet, the water from the process would get on the wood floor and destroy it.
Since the material was Engineered Stone, the fabricator had a really good chance of getting the tops out of there in one piece, thus insuring that he would lose the least amount of time, profit and product in making things right for the customer.
Simple end to a more complicated issue, right? Wrong!
Unknown to me until a week after it happened, the homeowner "caved in" to the pressure the fabricator put on her, and the fabricator went on to cut, grind and polish everything dry, and in place in the kitchen - 100% completely against what I had recommended. The homeowner got another opinion from someone who is not a fabricator, and that person said simply, "It's just dust - it's not fatal."
I then get an e-mail from the homeowner that rather sheepishly states that they were "assured" by the fabricator that they would "minimize the dust/water/mess," but after the "fix" had been done, the homeowner admitted that the fabricator had lied to them.
The dust was everywhere. The mess was absolute. Their wood floors buckled after being exposed to gallons of water and slurry (just as I said they would). Dust and slurry was on everything within 25 feet of the kitchen (again, just as I told them what would happen if they allowed their fabricator to do the work "in place").
Upon the fabricator's "completion" of the repair/fix, they commented that this was "the best they could do since they had to do the work in place." C'mon, man! That's the best excuse you can come up with?
What really happened here is that you had an in-experienced contractor who, for some reason, did not complete all of the edge polish properly, installed it that way, then wanted to fix the problem in place, making a worse situation than one that could have been avoided if he would have just removed the work and taken it back to his shop. Even if he had broken a piece and had to re-fab, he'd still be way ahead of where he is now.
If you have ever worked Engineered Stone/Quartz before, you know that processing and polishing it takes a lot more water than regular Granite and Marble, and that a good quality finish is pretty much impossible doing a Dry Process.
I really wanted to tell my client, "I told you so." They were given the correct path to choose, yet they ignored good advice in the belief that their fabricator (in this case) was right. Sadly, he was not, and now, there's a bigger mess on multiple levels.
The homeowner has a job that they are not happy with, and the fabricator hasn't gotten paid his final for the job. What's worse yet is that, as a result of this fiasco, the homeowner refuses to let anyone from Brand X Stone back on her property. And, so it goes, like the guy commenting on the situation said, "It's only dust - it's not fatal." Well, in this case, it might as well have been because the homeowner is probably considering murdering someone now!
The moral of this true story is this: pay attention to what you fab, ship and install. If someone in the process had only said, "Hey, this edge is not right - let's fix it before we install it," I'd be writing about something else right now!
Until next month - Best Regards and Happy Fabricating!
"Troubleshooting" is one of the services performed by Kevin M. Padden and AZ School of Rock in Gilbert, Arizona.
Find out more by logging on to their web site: www.azschoolofrock.com . For more information about class schedules, contact Kevin at 480-309-9422.
")