Granite worktops: any advice please?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not half as badly as being in th eoriginal volcano it comes from..

You make up an exact template, and someone else with the kit cuts it to size. Your monumental mason.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Whats an angle grinder FOR for gods sake?

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Shame that radioactivity of all the things it does do, doesn't give you headaches.

[Andrew May]

Completely off-topic I know but isn't slate metaporhic, created by heat and pressure on shale as opposed to ignious, from a volcano.

IANA-geologist.

Andrew

[The Natural Philosopher]

Slate is not formed in volcanoes. I am not sure its even metamorphic.

[Clive Summerfield]

Slate is the metamorphic form of Shale (which is itself sedimentary). It is formed more from pressure (burial depth approx 10km) than temperature (formation temp approx 200C)

Cheers Clive

[Andrew Gabriel]

Probably obvious, but neither am I ;-)

[Meoww]

This might help.

When we decided to take the granite route a few years ago, we had a good look at the stuff and decided that 20mm was too thin, 30mm was just about acceptable and 40mm was the biz..

Trouble is of course that 40mm and 30mm are not only very heavy, they're also very expensive.

So this is what we did...

We had the guy who sold us the granite make up matching strips of 20mm thick x the length of the unit x 100mm wide. In our case this meant that we had about five lengths of 1200 x 100 x 20mm. (We also did this for an island unit too - big kitchen!)

We then used 20mm granite (big saving in £££ and weight) and we had the supplier take the arris of the top and bottom show edges, likewise on the strips we had made. This is remarkably easy to do and only takes a minute with a grinder. We then glued the strip to the show edge of the worktop piece and voila, from the front it looks like a

40mm worktop with a rather nice birdsmouth in it. It knocks spots off 30mm!!

When it comes to fitting it, you just lay a 20mm piece of mdf on top of the unit to take the weight of the granite, making it smaller by the width of the strip and sit it on top. Be sparing with the 'good as nails' and make sure your truss is handy :)) It's really simple, effective and it'll save you just less than 1/3 of the price of 30mm granite.

If this isn't very cohesive, email me and I'll take a photo of ours for you and show you what I mean.

HTH

Patrick

[Clive Long,UK]

Patrick

Sorry to hi-jack this bit of the thread. Last year you wrote a useful (and amusing) entry on Damp. Two things.

One you mentioned a good book on damp (what a compelling read!) by the MD of Protim. I have been to their (Ireland) Web site and can find "Tony Lynch" as MD, but they are not flogging a book. Any more info you can provide that will help me track down this book?

Two you described a method of creating a vapour barrier at the base of a plaster wall. This involved bitumen but I didn't quite understand the details. COuld you redescribe the process for putting on such a barrier or should it be immediately obvious form your post on damp ?

BTW I am doing everything I can to improve air circulation and remove damp air at source in my flat to stop the "damp input" side of things

Thanks

CLive