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Answers

What should you ask a terrazzo supplier before you specify?

Ask which process it is, what the topping thickness is, and where the numbers come from. Those three answers settle most of the specification. Everything else — colour, chip, finish — is a preference, and a supplier who cannot answer the first three clearly cannot answer the rest.

The figures, and where each one comes from

Ask this Why it decides something
Which process is it precast, cement-bound, epoxy, poured, liquid or printed
What is the topping thickness and what does it allow as chip size
Which standard are you quoting JC/T 507, EN 13748-1, or neither
Which chip size and is it inside the limit for that thickness
What is the water absorption and is it the worst specimen or the average
Can this floor be re-ground printed glaze cannot
Same batch for repairs a later order will not match
What is your boundary condition what you have NOT tested
Do you supply the divider strips and to what joint width

Why the processes are not interchangeable

The eight later questions are all worth asking and none of them can be answered well until the first two are. Thickness decides chip size, and chip size decides what the floor will look like — so a supplier who quotes a beautiful 20 millimetre chip for an 8 millimetre topping is either describing something that will fail under the grinder or has not read the clause. The third question is the one that separates a supplier who works to a document from one who works to a habit, and the boundary question is the honest one: ask what they have not tested, because a supplier who answers that precisely is telling you what their guarantee actually covers.

What these figures are, and what they are not

The thickness-to-chip relationship quoted here is JC/T 507-2022 clause 5.3, and the absorption figures are from the same standard's table 7. ⛔ This page asks questions and does not answer them for anyone: we would rather a buyer arrived with the list than with our answers.

If you are specifying this

We have not published products against this question yet. Send us the process, thickness and quantity and we will quote it against what we can actually form, rather than against a catalogue.

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