Chapter 107 - Laying Tile

October 10th - 15th 2014

Chapter 106 was the last of the lamp shades which I had already done a while ago.  So I am at chapter 107 which is just more tiling.

This chapter is pretty challenging.  I had to find a way to cut the tiles.  It was not a good thing.  These tiles put up a sh!tload of dust during the cutting and since my dremel type tool couldn’t even do the job, I had to find another solution.  What I came up with is carefully using a pair of cutters and fracturing the tiles at the right point, then sanding them down.  It was a total pain to have to work out measuring for the cutting since the tiles are bowed in the other direction and fitting them to the corner upturned angles meant that I had to first heat them with the drier, then bend them somewhat, take the measurements, cut with the cutters, sand and then rebend them again with the drier before gluing them in place.  My goal of finishing by the end of the year has pretty much gone out the window.  I lost a few days work on the house too because I caught a cold (already) and was miserable from Thursday till Sunday afternoon when finally I felt well enough to tackle the tiles.  In any case, I sanded one with the dremel sander and clearly I will need a mask to do this work.  The tediousness is not very conducive to me wanting to work on the tiles.  But as I pushed on, I found a few helpful methods. 
One was using the cutters and cutting away slowly and taking away smaller bits at a time.  This saved me time in power sanding which created way too much dust.






I also found my jewelry jig.  Using the little pegs and heating up the pieces with the drier, I locked them into place and let them cool in that position.  I was hoping that it would save time instead of heating up one at a time and forcing the bow out of them.  As it turned out, it did help somewhat as the pieces didn’t need as much force to hold them in place during gluing. 

Using the jig to flatten out the bowed tiles

Adding the tiles (rebent in the other direction now)

I got on a roll Tuesday afternoon and then Wednesday morning and managed to finish cutting and gluing in the tiles that were available. (I found my first truly defective tile - the waves go in the wrong direction and the thicker edge is on the top instead of the bottom.  I can still probably use the tile for filling.)  I was covered in dust (but the mask works well-but I'm going to wear goggles too from now on) and used my little weights to hold some tiles in place.  I also had to sand down the height of one of the tiles as I noticed that the width was a bit imperfect.  But with the power sander I made quick work of it.  Albeit dusty work.

On a roll...