DrPizza
Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
I worked at Daltile in the engineering department, quality control, etc. While I didn't work with the 12x12 tile, I worked with the 1" and 2" tile extensively. "B-grade"? wtf is that. Irregular size/thickness? Knowing the method of how the tiles are made, I cannot fathom how that can happen, nor how they're going to sort different grades of tile. It is very easy to control the amount of material pressed into a tile that any differences in size would be imperceptible except to incredibly sensitive instruments. i.e. any difference will be completely negligible. I do know that from time to time there was a bit of color variation, depending on different things that can happen in the kiln (temperatures off by a little bit in one section can cause a slight difference in the final color - imperceptible to most people, and certainly imperceptible if you didn't have a standard to compare it against.
However, think about it - who do you think sells more tile? Home Depot and the other big stores, or the specialty shop? That means 90% of the tile must be B grade, and only 10% A grade??
btw, that job was the nail in the coffin why I'm a teacher and not an engineer. Not enough problems to solve, and the rest of the job was quite monotonous. Make sure the water released from the plant was clear enough; determine if more flocculants needed to be added to the water, assess the quality of the ingredients in the train cars before they were dumped into the plant, test EVERY single batch of powder before it was pressed into tiles & put into the kiln... day after day it was the same tests, same results. Something "new" would be "hey, this company needs a tile *this* color. Make it." After a couple weeks of refinements, we'd be able to match that color so well that any difference would be imperceptible to the human eye.
However, think about it - who do you think sells more tile? Home Depot and the other big stores, or the specialty shop? That means 90% of the tile must be B grade, and only 10% A grade??
btw, that job was the nail in the coffin why I'm a teacher and not an engineer. Not enough problems to solve, and the rest of the job was quite monotonous. Make sure the water released from the plant was clear enough; determine if more flocculants needed to be added to the water, assess the quality of the ingredients in the train cars before they were dumped into the plant, test EVERY single batch of powder before it was pressed into tiles & put into the kiln... day after day it was the same tests, same results. Something "new" would be "hey, this company needs a tile *this* color. Make it." After a couple weeks of refinements, we'd be able to match that color so well that any difference would be imperceptible to the human eye.