Penny floor details
Houston we are out of pennies!
Mysteries of the penny floor disclosed: There was not much online about how to install a penny floor. Plenty of articles describing the floors with pictures, but very little info on glue, flooring material etc. Those guys used a black grout, it looks like the people here used thin set. Not really sure what these guys used but I am very happy that I am only doing 100sqft. I got a tip from the comments here stating that resin was used as a topcoat, that gave me an idea.
We definitely wanted the floor to be sealed. While having exposed pennies age would be cool we figured it would be too hard to clean and too cold on the feet. I had an extra gallon of polyurethane snowboard resin which has been very useful in making random things so I figured I would give that a try. As I mentioned before the first attempt was to actually put the whole thing in the snowboard vacuum bag and essentially veneer the pennies onto existing laminate tile. I never made it that far because I discovered that hand laying these is easier and not that difficult. I wanted the mould to be extremely precise (when intersecting pennies are 5/8" to center, pure diameter they are 3/4". So I used a 3/4" router bit on 5/8" lines. It came out ok, with some gaps, but the real trouble is intersecting the tiles. I probably could have got it working in the vacuum bag but it would take a long time to build all the 1x1 tiles even 4 at a time.
Hand laying is the way to go. Polyurethane resin works very well and it holds my snowboards together so I know it has pretty good impact strength. It has very poor tensile strength so I expect cracks in the first earthquake. To strengthen it I could have laid a layer of fiberglass mat under the pennies, but I hadn't really thought of that and it would increase the cost. Once dried the surface is very smooth and not cold at all. As you can see from the picture below the resin amplifies the pennies shine when exposed to light.
In other news I noticed that the site (graf snowboards) where I learned how to make snowboards is no longer online :(. Going through that process taught me so much about laminate construction and exposed me to some great tricks (vac bagging)
Mysteries of the penny floor disclosed: There was not much online about how to install a penny floor. Plenty of articles describing the floors with pictures, but very little info on glue, flooring material etc. Those guys used a black grout, it looks like the people here used thin set. Not really sure what these guys used but I am very happy that I am only doing 100sqft. I got a tip from the comments here stating that resin was used as a topcoat, that gave me an idea.
We definitely wanted the floor to be sealed. While having exposed pennies age would be cool we figured it would be too hard to clean and too cold on the feet. I had an extra gallon of polyurethane snowboard resin which has been very useful in making random things so I figured I would give that a try. As I mentioned before the first attempt was to actually put the whole thing in the snowboard vacuum bag and essentially veneer the pennies onto existing laminate tile. I never made it that far because I discovered that hand laying these is easier and not that difficult. I wanted the mould to be extremely precise (when intersecting pennies are 5/8" to center, pure diameter they are 3/4". So I used a 3/4" router bit on 5/8" lines. It came out ok, with some gaps, but the real trouble is intersecting the tiles. I probably could have got it working in the vacuum bag but it would take a long time to build all the 1x1 tiles even 4 at a time.
Hand laying is the way to go. Polyurethane resin works very well and it holds my snowboards together so I know it has pretty good impact strength. It has very poor tensile strength so I expect cracks in the first earthquake. To strengthen it I could have laid a layer of fiberglass mat under the pennies, but I hadn't really thought of that and it would increase the cost. Once dried the surface is very smooth and not cold at all. As you can see from the picture below the resin amplifies the pennies shine when exposed to light.
In other news I noticed that the site (graf snowboards) where I learned how to make snowboards is no longer online :(. Going through that process taught me so much about laminate construction and exposed me to some great tricks (vac bagging)
Labels: Home Restoration, Office, penny floor
posted by MacGyver at
9:50 PM
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