Granite Countertops—Spotlight On Edge Polish
Recently a customer chose a dark black granite color for their kitchen countertops and wanted to know why the polish on the edge detail appeared some-what duller than the surface of their countertop. Well that is a good question and here is the long and short of it…
Granite fabricators purchase and receive polished stone slabs from various suppliers, or quarriers. Rigorous steps and procedures are taken to procure blocks of granite from the earth by quarriers, where they are then sliced/cut into slabs by large saws. Once the blocks are cut into slabs, they go through a polishing process. Slabs are loaded onto large polishing machines where diamond polishing pads move over the face to polish the entire slab.
When it comes time to fabricate the pieces for your granite countertop, the fabricator custom-cuts the slab to your specifications and then polishes the edges. Most fabricators use straight-line polishing machines, cnc mills, and various hand tools to polish the edges of the stone. Since this equipment is much smaller and contains smaller diamond pads, it is impossible to match the polishing quality obtained from the much larger polishing machines used by factory quarriers for the face of the slab.
The difference in the quality of the polish from the top to the edge is not visibly noticeable in most granite color selections. The difference may be more noticeable in a few black, or darker colors, but it is rare that a consumer would even notice the difference.
Thanks for reading!
Barb
Posted in Uncategorized on January 29th, 2009 by Barb | | 2 Comments
on March 12th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
you can get a polish to match the surface if you take quite a long time fabracating it but the will cut profits down threw labor “remember stone fabing is a long process” although using some chemicals you can get a match in most black stone such as slate use ager
absolute black a mix of uniblack 1 as a first step followed by uniblack 2.yellow stone is one i found to be impossable to match ager is close but not the same.
Reply
on March 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Jeff:
Yes-the extra effort is not necessary, when most comsumers can not even recognize the difference.
Thanks for your comments!
Barb
Reply