After the cladding tiles made from natural marble began to appear on the market, it became possible to arrange real marble floors. Increasingly, marble floors can be found in residential mansions and apartments, in public buildings, in solid office buildings. In the manufacture of such floors, two methods are used.
The first method is polished tiles
marble floorUsually tiles sold in stores are already polished. It is produced in exact dimensions so that installation is possible without seams. Polished surfaces are impregnated with a water repellent, a special liquid that makes the surface layer stronger and protects it from other liquids getting into the pores of the stone. This procedure protects the stone from staining.
Laying marble with this method is carried out in the same way as for conventional ceramic tiles. It is only necessary to work extremely carefully so that each laid tile fits exactly into the overall plane of the floor. It is impossible to get an ideal plane, but the more carefully the work is done, the better the floor will look. After the completion of the work, the crystallization of the marble is carried outIs a thermochemical procedure that imparts saturation and depth of color to the polished surface.
This method is cheaper than the next one, but manual installation cannot give the ideal quality of work, especially if it is necessary to make a mosaic floor from stones of different colors.
The second way is polished floor
If the work is supposed to be done in this particular way, then the tile is used unpolished: its front surface is not completely processed. Laying should also be neat: unnecessary distortions will increase the time for further processing. This method is used to lay a complex pattern of mosaic floors, where each tile must be adjusted in shape and size. When the tiles are laid and the glue has completely hardened, becoming strong enough, sanding begins immediately on the entire surface of the floor.
The main equipment for this operation is a planetary multi-spindle grinder. It has several spindles for mounting grinding wheels. Each of them rotates around its own axis, and all axes, in turn, rotate around the common axis of the planetary mechanism. As a result, all sections of the grinding wheels move along complex trajectories, simultaneously covering the surfaces of several tiles. Thanks to the feed movement, when the machine is moved across the floor, all new areas of the floor are involved in the treatment.
As a result, no inaccuracies and even minor distortions remain on the floor, which are inevitable if laying marbleperformed manually. It turns out a single flat surface, and it seems that the entire floor is a monolithic stone slab. If there are gaps between the tiles after laying, they are sealed with epoxy putty. Dye is added to the putty to match the color of marble, and sometimes fine marble chips.
For grinding, it is necessary to perform several passes with a gradual transition from coarse wheels to smaller ones, under the influence of which traces of the work of the coarse wheels, from which the processing began, are removed.
It's time to replace the wheels on the grinding machine with polishing ones, after which the processing continues until a mirror-like shine is obtained on the entire surface.
After polishing, the surface must be hydrophobized and additional polishing and crystallization of the marble.... In its final form, the marble floor looks like a solid mirror surface of incredible beauty. It is also desirable to treat the surface of the marble with a protective polymerizing film.