My Tool Is Bigger Than Your Tool
July 2010
Shopping for granite can be tough !
You visit a couple of places, and try to get find out which outfit is the best match from you. Sometimes a business has made a HUGE investment in a piece of technology, and they'll make sure you know about, and make it sound like you're a fool if you purchase stone from somebody who doesn't do it their way.
Is the hype really worth it?
Templating: You can get precise measurements from 3D Photography , wooden templates, the laser, or the computer thingy attached to a string. Some of the huge shops might run 3 different systems at the same time. Does it matter to the end user? Maybe, maybe not. Biggest question is will it measure accurately for your home? From the business owners perspective the biggest question is, how many countertops will I have to re-cut during a year? Ask your salesperson about how they measure, it really doesn't matter how it's done, but look them in the eye when you ask if their system has operators that can make it WORK. The high tech, middle tech, or low tech all depend on the same wild card variable, THE HUMAN OPERATOR! You can't run a top of the line stone shop without a fantastic measuring system, whatever it is.
Cutting: Granite can be cut with a hand saw on the back of a pick up truck, or with a $500,000 monster machine that would be right at home in Terminator 4 with Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's lots of ways to cut the stone. As a homeowner, your biggest question is how well the cutting tool follows the measuring process. There's a lot of technical capabilities that you'd ask if you were buying a saw, but once again look your salesperson in the eye, and ask about THE HUMAN OPERATOR! Maybe a robot machine can cut the job all by itself, but that data was loaded in by a person.
Polishing: (flame suit on). This is where it can get really interesting. There are some places that just don't know how to polish stone. They usually go out of business in the first 36 months. Eventually you discover that there are a thousand kinds of stones, and that after you master a dozen different kinds of polishing styles you eventually get to "feel" or "hear" if you're in the Zone. As a business owner you discover that polishing is definately an art. Some people can be taught, and some can't. Shortly thereafter you learn that those who can be taught will ask for a raise! After a couple years or decades of that, you'll be at the trade shows looking at CNC MACHINES. CNC polishing machines can be a huge game changer. Some shops have HUMAN OPERATORS that can squeeze out all the potential in a machine, some go nuts trying to figure out why the machine is going out of wack and putting out so/so edges. Some places just give up, polish with a machine, and then bring those highly paid hand fabricators back in to "touch it up". Every shop is going to come up with a different plan. Just ask them what kind of edges they put out, and find out if they know what they're doing!
