Why no mention of good ol' glue?

[GregWood]

On all the tile repairs I've done over the years, I have always opted for cellulose or silica thickened epoxy (good stuff, like system 3) and the results have been better than 100%

I say better than 100% because in my sister's house she had someone tile the kitchen (other than me) and it's been a constant battle for YEARS with popping tiles and three different tile guys until I got finally got involved and glued 'em down. They haven't moved in a year. They are in there so good the grout hasn't even begun to chip. The previous record was 3 months.

I did a tile job on a friend's counter top and it was nothing but trouble until I yanked it apart and used epoxy (his wife is short and tends to walk around on the counter to get up to the top shelves of the cabinets and the two hundred fifty pound porcelain sink on the sixty year old restored cabinets didn't help either.)

Nice working time, hard as a rock overnight, it can be removed by mechanical means, and fills gaps. It's waterproof, inert, and chemical resistant. It has a shock resistance that no mortar will ever have.

In fact, the results have been so phenominal, it's all I'm using on this granite job I'm doing now. (I use 30 second working time hot melt to hold the edging in position while the epoxy cures.)

[BTW, mark this thread, I'm gonna post pictures of how I prepped the formica countertop for tiling when I start the other side of it.]

And all things considered, between plastic spoons, disposable dixie cups, coat hangar mixing tools, popsicle stick application, and playing card spreading tools, the cleanup has been zero.

Why do I see so little mention of epoxy as a main adhesive for all these re-do's and re-tilings and small countertop jobs? If you have questions, ask away.

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[Steven Hauser]

Hi Greg,

We use lots and lots of epoxy.
Here is a potential scenario.

True epoxy is harder to spread and for many harder to accustomed to. Since there are many products that meet the ANSI standards many people move on to evaluate what is easy.

[Shaughnn]

There is also the added joy of developing epoxy-related illnesses. Once you've got an epoxy allegy, you will be very surprised by how much epoxy fumes will effect you and in what small amounts. I've got a friend who literally can not be in the same building as epoxy without turning into a strawberry and his lungs closing up. I'd say, "Handle with care"
Shaughnn

[GregWood]

All this stuff stinks, you get lung cancer from silica dust, cement gives you dermatitis. Gotta be careful with everything. (regarding epoxy allergies.)

-------------

I mentioned above how I was going to post a picture of how I "cheated" and installed tile over a formica countertop in the past using epoxy instead of messing around with backer boards and thinset.

Can't attach anything to formica itself, it'll give sooner or later, so you either have to get the formica off or screw something on top of it to mount the tile to.

Peeling formica off a piece of wood is impossible, so here's my method for getting down to the wood underneath so I can attach the tile firmly to the existing countertop (provided it's structurally sound).

Cut with a hole saw just through the formica to the wood,
peel out the formica button inside the circle with a chisel,
buzz off the left-behind contact cement (from the formica) with a dremel or shave it off with a small chisel,
defriz the wood with a wire brush to get the little stray wood chips off,
now you have a nice raw clean wood surface to epoxy the tile to. In this case the edge.

(I'm sorry that was so incredibly vauge before.) :)

[Mike2]

Greg, you done lost me with that last post and picher....I don't have a clue what you are doing, trying to do, or have done??? :)

[GregWood]

so sorry bout that, I went back and added appropriate detail.

[Mike2]

Ahhhh, much better now Greg. So what did you find under those buttons? Plywood or MDF?

[cx]

Peeling formica off a piece of wood is impossible Actually, removing the formica edge from that style countertop with a heat gun would usually be substantially faster, Greg.

My opinion; worth price charged.

[GregWood]

I thought of that, but something from past experience tells me the heat gun does something very undesirable. Don't quite remember if it was noxious odors or the wood simply falling apart underneath from the heat, but something that caused great unhappiness.

This takes less than ten minutes a square foot, faster on top where I can use a trim router and straight bit to clean the inside of the cutouts, and the wood underneath has not been compromised by heat. Contact cement is neoprene or latex based (dependin on how old it is) and doesn't begin to give until it starts to burn.

The wood underneath is the older style good particle board made up with small flakes. It's structurally sound, flat, and (most importantly!) settled. That's why I wanted so much not to have to remove it.

There was one small part on the back that was a little water damaged and swollen, I cut the whole area clean out with a chisel and filled it in with a coarse sawdust and epoxy "mortar", laid a piece of wax paper over it an put a few books on it to make sure it stayed flush with the rest of the top. Came out great.

[bbcamp]

"...a little water damaged and swollen..." My Spidey senses are tingling! :twitch:

[Bill Vincent]

Same here, Bob. Especially the part where epoxy is used to hold a tile job together where it's been popping loose previously. It's been my experience that if tile is popping loose, sure, you can reset them with epoxy. But sooner or later, the grout will start going, and if you change the grout to epoxy, then the tile starts to crack. If there's movement in the floor, the tile's sure not going to stop it, and sooner or later you end up with the same (or worse) problems, only now, the demo is alot tougher.

Greg, so far, I'd say you've been real lucky. :)

[cx]

The wood underneath is the older style good particle board made up with small flakes. It's structurally sound, flat, and (most importantly!) settled. That's why I wanted so much not to have to remove it. That stuff is more than a little worse than the newer, higher-density particle-board when it comes to moisture damage in my experience, Greg.

Actually, the whole discussion of how to poke holes in the Formica to best expose the particle-board top is kinda academic, I'm still gonna recommend against ever using particle-board as a component in any tile countertop project, regardless the method of adhering the tiles. Just ain't worth the risk, to my mind.

The only part of this exercise that I'm willing to sign on to at all is using epoxy to stick the edge trim tiles to the edge. I've used that method many times to make repairs of edge tiles that have fallen off and never had a failure. I don't think it's a practical alternative to thinset for the top surface, though, not for cost, ease of application, ease of leveling and aligning tiles, durability, etc. I just don't see an advantage to switching to epoxy, except maybe for tiling over particle-board, which I'm gonna continue to recommend strongly against.

My opinion; worth price charged.

[GregWood]

I am absorbing your wisdoms, however, in regards to the floor, I was repairing a previous bad job done by someone else, and "repairs" that made the problem even worse by yet another schmuck, so in essence, its a salvage operation with nothing to lose. The other option is pulling the kitchen apart. That's not gonna happen because ten tiles on one side of the room don't want to stay put with thinset.

It's lasting wonderfully and when it does start crapping out again down the road, it gets delt with then.

However, I do have to fully stand by my methodology for not scrapping these countertops in my kitchen. I've done this several times before and ran into more problems than not by putting new tops on for tile.

This is what I do: restoration, not rebuilding. This house is a hundred years old. The last two houses I did were built in the mid 1800's.

Gotta use a little different thinking and approach than just tearing things out and replacing them. You repair rather than replace because when a house is that old, everything is connected to everything else and THAT stuff is not moving, it's not going anywhere, the parts you just installed that the ones that are gonna move and bend and twist.

I was working with another contactor briefly and I put up new lath and re-plastered a wall repair before he even shimmed up the drywall on the cockeyed beams on the opposite side of the room. He looked at me like I was biggest butthead he ever saw while I was mixing up the plaster and whipping out the darby... Two years later, my plaster repair is still perfect and the drywall repair has joint problems.

When you're in an old house, things are warped, the irreplaceable solid hardwood cabinets installed thirty years ago are settled on cockeyed floors. You attach new, straight wood and tiles to that, and it's a recipe for trouble when the new wood "adapts" to it's surroundings. I'd much rather have a countertop that's solid and stable and perhaps off by a 1/4" than having a new piece of wood stabilizing with cracked grouts over the next five years because I know right now, that's exactly what's going to happen.

The damage to the particle board was minimal, it's been repaired. The formica has not been removed so the wood is protected aside from the clearance holes which are now protected by glue. And epoxy holds to particle board way stronger than the wood is, thinset doesn't. I guarantee you, it's not going anywhere in my lifetime.

[Mike2]

Hi Greg. :)

While I subscribe to the notion that thinking out of the box might serve one well at times restoring 100+ year old structures, that argument doesn't hold much water working with modern day man-made products like MDF and Formica. Humidity alone can cause MDF to swell.

I think you are headed down a slippery slope with your epoxy/button technique of setting tile directly on plastic laminate over MDF.

[cx]

Yep, restoration of a hunnert year old house to maintain historic content would not include savin' no particle board. Tile counter top back then would have been installed on mud over real boards.

Some of us still like to do it that way, too, 'cept we still start with plywood instead of boards. Great way to compensate for any out of square or off level situations, too. :)

[GregWood]

No, I'm not historically salvaging the formica... :) I'm salvaging the time and the trouble I'll have down the road if I pull these off and put new countertops on. I know this works.

I'm just discussing that when I work on something old, cockeyed, settled, warped, and fifty other adjectives that apply to the ancient housing around here (new york area), one has to take a different approach than just ripping things apart and replacing them.

What I was surprised with as I was reading through the posts is there is such little mention of repairing or salvaging ANYTHING. It's all, rip it out, replace it, use backer board, check this, don't risk it. That's all fine and dandy where you're talking about people that are skilled like you -- but I've also seen far more jobs where people, do-it-yourselfers and even "contractors" ripped things out and did everything new and ended up with a disaster. New wood is the stuff that swells and twists and buckles...if it's been sitting there for 20 years, it's moved all its going to.

[Bill Vincent]

New wood is the stuff that swells and twists and buckles...if it's been sitting there for 20 years, it's moved all its going to.

That's where you're wrong, Greg. ALot of people end up with failures because of exactly that misunderstanding. All the SETTLING might be done, but not all the movement. ALL wood expands and contracts due to seasonal change, as well as humidity and other environmental factors. There's no stopping it or changing it. What needs to be done is to account for it, so that this movement doesn't tear the installation apart. What's more, whereas soft wood is used for most framework nowadays, like pine or fir, the older homes all seem to have hardwood for their framing, atleast up here in Maine, they do, and that's even more unstable than soft wood.

[John Bridge]

Greg,

This thread has more to do with philosophy that it does with getting a project done -- your philosophy against everyone elses'. :D I am therefore going to move it to the mud box. What we try to do here (the Advice Forum)is give people the "best" advice they can get anywhere. There are no quickie techniques or hurry-up methods.

[GregWood]

This conversation has turned totally academic... :)

"People" -- a lot of our fellow "contractors" included, I'm sorry to say -- end up with failures because they're inexperienced. They're cheap and opt for the lowest cost materials and the people they get help from picking the stuff out don't know what they're talking about either. They go to home depot and buy junk plywood or 2x4 that just rolled off the mill last month and still has five pounds of water to lose. You can FEEL the water in the wood. They're on a budget and see what a premium piece of wood from a good lumber yard costs compared to the one on sale at the home center and their checkbook makes up their mind for them. The particle board they buy is made from third generation recycled floor sweepings from a pulp mill rather than sawdust from a lumber mill.

They don't have the experience to tell them what glue, cement, or backer to use, they put it on wrong, don't have any idea how to prep a surface, don't use anywhere near enough screws, the screws they use are crap, too long, too short, or have the tensile strength of a popsicle stick. They wouldn't know a good piece of wood from a bad one at the lumber yard if their life depended on it. They'll sand a surface to give the glue something to bite into and blow the dust off with their mouth! They don't understand that you have to let the glue sit for several minutes before the pieces are clamped or screwed together to allow it to "prime" the surface.

They don't understand that a mismatched glue, or an epoxy or polyester resin without the proper fillers, is about as effective as using bubble gum to hold your fender on. You don't use portand cement without filler like sand, do you? And you don't paint a rusty surface without cleaning it and priming it. It just doesn't work.

Nor can they effectively assess the history of the "thing" they are reworking by inspection, be it cabinet, countertop, piece of furniture, floor, or basement wall. I can. You can. Or is that the problem? Don't you don't have enough faith in your own experience to know when a surface is viable or not?

By new wood, I mean wood that has been cut recently. From a physics standpoint, a fine furniture maker -- the masters past and present -- the ones that make pieces that are (or will) still be around 200 years later, will not use a piece of wood that hasn't sit around for a year.

This is what you're paying for when you buy truly premium wood. It's aged like a whiskey might be because no amount of drying or "proper" storage will make up for a piece of wood just "being around" for a long time. It's not stacked twenty high on top of other wood, it's put on individual shelves with air space around it. It swells, contracts, warps, and seeks it's own equilibrium. Once that has happened, and then milled and planed, it may move linearly, the same way a tile or piece of steel may expand and contract on a plane, but it's not twisting around anymore. This is fact. That piece of plywood sits flat on a shelf in a warehouse...cut a piece off the end and lay it on the floor for a few weeks and see what happens to it! I got useless plywood all over my shop.

Once again, just ripping it out and replacing it isn't always the right thing to do because considering everything I mentioned, a person CAN screw up what they replace far worse than what was there in the first place! It's happened to me. I've seen it happen in far to many other "professional" installations. I've tiled over existing countertops (that were in good shape) and they've lasted years without the slightest problems; I've replaced countertops on level cabinets, with two pieces of 3/4 plywood held together with screws every six inches and backer board on top -- that top wasn't going to flex if you drove a car across it -- and still had problems with tiles coming loose.

Furthermore, as a side bar, the terms hardwoods and softwoods are misleading. Softwoods come from conifers and hardwoods come from leafy trees. There are softwoods that are harder than hardwoods -- balsa wood is a hardwood -- it's the straightness of the grain of the wood that makes them stable or unstable. Some woods naturally have tight straight grain like poplar, which is why it's such a staple of the industry. That's why those old tile countertops made on planks a hundred years ago that CX mentioned lasted forever -- they were old growth woods with tight grain that was aged properly. New wood has neither tight, straight grain, nor is it aged properly. There's a whole multi million dollar industry out there selling "vintage" wood for that very reason.

Now I fully understand this all started discussing particle board, but many of the same things apply. It's not some waterlogged swelled micky-mouse 1/2" economy bathroom vanity countertop from Lowes or Home depot -- and aside from one small area that has been completely routed out and replaced -- it's a sterling double 3/4 countertop with no lifting laminate anywhere.

And when I discussed the floor, that's physics too. Tile has no give. None at all. Neither does mortar. Unfortunately the floor it was on does have a little flex to it. It's not a trampoline, but heck, stuff happens. I am NOT gutting the room, reinforcing beams, and laying 2" of plywood on the floor to keep it from happening. The interface between the two has to have a little give or it's going to break loose. Properly filled epoxies have that little give that is needed, as well as an adhesive tensile strength that mortar doesn't have, that's why IT works and nothing else will.