I have a tile floor ceramic tiles. no metal gets ground into the
tile so I get to keep all my dust and sweeps. Adds up over the
years. Check with your refiner and see what they recommend some
might not take that type of tiles.
I have VCT tiles in my artist live/work space in Seattle. I’ve
recently gotten back to jewelry making, nothing heavy duty. The
tiles are durable and tough. You probably don’t care about how they
will look eventually. However, the tiles need care if you do. They
need to be sealed with a sealer made for those tiles. The surface of
that sealer will scratch eventually and will need to be rebuffed
with an electric buffer and a variety of buffing wheels from coarse
to fine depending, then resealed.
They are often used for commercial spaces and are also on the floors
in the office spaces downstairs in this building. They were not well
maintained on the main floor and by the time they finally hired a
professional floor person, the floors were a mess and he could not
buff out all the “black areas”. So they still function, but look
really bad.
Read the manufacturer’s specs and maybe put on the heavy duty sealer
when they are first installed…
I have the snap-together tiles, made originally for garage floors.
The surface burns when you drop something hot and chemical stains are
permanent. Also, I have found that regular mopping does not get rid
of grimy areas. I have tried hands-and-knees scrubbing on some areas
with not much improvement.
On the other hand, what I really like is that since the tiles have
"air" under them they dry perfectly if a heavy rain overloads the
sump pump and water comes into my basement studio. The water runs
underneath the tiles and goes to the floor drain. I just slosh clean
water on to rinse.
The trouble with “floating” floors is that they are noisy when
walked upon. in a small studio with one person maybe not a problem.
The sound is a bit hard to describe - kind of clacky, especially if
you have hard soled shoes. Even if the noise doesn’t directly annoy
you it leaves a sort of uneasy feeling, as though you are walking on
cheap and cheesy construction. That factor decided us against
floating floor when we built our house.
Glue down is not hard to do. Can be messy if you’re not careful -
but just apply the same care and foresight as with your other work
and you’ll be OK - not rocket science. I’d probably use glue even
with the click-together floorboards.
My 2 cents.
Marty in Victoria - a nice, quiet city
I'd probably use glue even with the click-together floorboards.
If you mean gluing the joints, it may be OK (but why bother?). The
reason these floors are “floating” is that they expand and contract
with temperature and humidity changes. If you glue them to the
substrate, they will eventually buckle or separate or both.
Also if you leave room on the sides like you’re supposed to they
don’t make noise. It is a shop. It’s going to get beat so this makes
it an easy job to fix if you ever care to. Cheap and easy
Keep in mind that the more cracks, gaps and seams there are in the
floor, the more sweeps will find their way into them. If you work in
gold or platinum quite a lot of money can disappear into those
cracks. Also, it’s useful to have a floor that does not grind sweeps
into the soles of your shoes so that they then walk out the door.
Many shops in Europe are floored with steel grids. Sweeps that
escape the pan or apron fall through the grid, and the grids can be
taken up from time to time to reclaim the metal.
The trouble with "floating" floors is that they are noisy when
walked upon.
I had investigated floating floors. It is possible to get
interlocking vinyl floating floors, no glue required. Given that they
are soft vinyl, I would expect them to be quieter than the hard
laminate interlocking floors.
I actually would prefer a floating floor as it would be easier to
install than a glue down vinyl composite tile floor, but the
interlocking floors have a very thin wear layer of vinyl as compared
to the commercial style vinyl tiles, which have the same composition
and colour throughout. The vinyl composite tiles will last much
longer than the available interlocking vinyl floors that I have seen.
Hi Elliot, While I see the beauty of the steel grids allowing for
recovery of sweeps, what do you do if you drop a stone or a component
into the grid? Must be real hard to find and retrieve.
While I see the beauty of the steel grids allowing for recovery of
sweeps, what do you do if you drop a stone or a component into the
grid? Must be real hard to find and retrieve.
The grids are in panels which are easily lifted up. The panels sit
within frames which are mounted to the floor. Like what dropped
ceiling tiles would look like from above. Drop a stone? Just lift the
panel.
Of course, sometimes you might have to lift a couple of panels if it
bounces.
Funny story. One of my teachers apprenticed in his father’s shop in
Belgium. They had gridded floors. One time he dropped a diamond, not
a major stone, but not melee either. They picked up the grid under
his bench, not there. They picked up the grids to either side, not
there. The picked up all the grids in that part of the shop, not
there. A mystery, and they had to replace the stone.
At the end of the year they unmounted the retaining frames to get at
any sweeps that were trapped underneath and they found the stone. It
had somehow become lodged under the retaining frame. A very odd
circumstance.