Dekton Fabrication

[michaelcheaney]

I want to be sure I am doing the right thing .When cutting dekton on Yukon bridge saw ,the bands need to be cut off first and removed then you can begin to cut decks out ,right.also slab has to be cut on top of a plywood substrate?

[Dave.Scott]

You need to remove strips from the long edges that are 3/4 to 1 inch wide. This will relieve some of the stresses that are in the slab. We cut on 1/4 inch cement board which will dampen the vibration and will not glaze your blade.
Remember that the white colors are the hardest and get progressively softer the darker the color is so slow down your feed rate, and more water = better cut.

Check out the "How to" forum in the members area for other tips.

[karen123]

i think you have got the best advice here, so what is the update now??? you must be done with your fabrication now so upload some pictures of it

[Dave.Scott]

Micheal,
How is it going with Dekton?
Is there any other thing that I can help you with?

We are installing 4+ Dekton jobs a week and even making sinks out of Dekton.

[Shiny Alex]

we use cement fibre board (Hardieflex) on top of the ply bed for all our work (GMM Brio) and run the blade 4/5mm below the slab for Dekton and 1.4mm for ES. This is from recommendations from other local fabricators and this seems to make the blades last a lot longer.

For us I've found Mitre cuts to work best at about 0.3-0.5m/pm and upto 0.7 for square cuts (we only seem to do Doomoos and Cirrus for some reason, in the year we've been doing it that's all we've done). and run our saw at about 1450/1500 rpm.

Definitely cut at least 25mm off the long edges as its a crazy amount of tension in the sheets (10-20mm bow in the cut off selvedge edge).

We've been told locally that the reason Dekton has had so many saw blades come out and work and then not work is because they've been constantly changing the Dekton formula, but seem to have got it sorted now. How much truth is in that I don't know.

[Mark Meriaux]

FWIW, here is some helpful information from Terminator:
http://www.terminatordia.com/top-tips-f ... -materials

I also posted this in the How-To sections.

[ck2016]

I have to disagree completely with the suggestion to place 1/2 foam board under a dekton slab. That is of course unless you like flying glass all through your shop and employees.

I also question the feed rates that terminator posted. I have never achieved anwhere near 35 inpermin on Dekton. Highest Ive been able to achieve is 14.

[Andrew H]

We don't cut on foam board but I'm not going to say it doesn't work. I think with many peoples set up, there are multiple different "tricks" to help cut the product. We are Cutting on cement board, on top of a concrete table saw using a 16" tyrolit blade and we are steady cutting at 45 ipm on our Sasso. We start the cut and end the cut around 20ipm. Unfortunately we just sit there and "ride the knob" since we haven't bothered to figure out how to vary the ipm in the program we send to the saw. I also recommend hitting your blade frequently with a grinding stone to keep it nice and sharp.

[Dan R.]

I just visited the Lapitec plant and Italy. I will try and post it in the documents room after Coverings.

Lapitec, according to Lapitec, is different from Dekton. It has color through out the material and is not pressed.
Lapitec says to cut a strip off of the short side and a a long side. There are specified amounts for each thickness. After the 2 edges are cut off, it is important to cut to the opened sides. This seems like common sense for all slabs with internal pressure.

Surely, one of the Dekton qualified fabricators can chime in with the directions that come with certification. Eh?

[Dave.Scott]

Things to remember with all sinthered products -- Dekton, Lapitec, Neolith

Light colors are harder than darker colors.
We run 2350 rpm @ 25 inches per minute (14-inch blade) on white/light colors
and 2150 rpm @ 40 inch/minute on dark/black colors.
Slow down feed rate on entry and exit of cut.
Listen; the more noise your blade is making the harder it is working.

Relieve stresses by cutting off tension strips long and short edges-- as per manufacturer's recommendations.
Some manufacturers (Lapitec) want you to cut off tension strips on 1 long and 1 short edge, then begin your cut coming in through the rough edge and proceed toward the edge that the tension strip has been removed from.

Place cutouts towards the center of the slab and cut them last.
Drill Core holes on all inside corners of the cutouts before plunge cutting the sides of the cutouts.
Also helps to core in the inside corners of "L" shaped pieces.

Flat table and vibration dampening material on top of table.

Correct blade.

Water, water, water.

[Shiny Alex]

I just visited the Lapitec plant and Italy. I will try and post it in the documents room after Coverings.

Lapitec, according to Lapitec, is different from Dekton. It has color through out the material and is not pressed.
Lapitec says to cut a strip off of the short side and a a long side. There are specified amounts for each thickness. After the 2 edges are cut off, it is important to cut to the opened sides. This seems like common sense for all slabs with internal pressure.

Surely, one of the Dekton qualified fabricators can chime in with the directions that come with certification. Eh?

Not heard of it that way, for Dekton we were recommended an inch off of the 2 longest sides is enough.

Still waiting to see if we're going to pick Neolith up, I'm keen to. But the boss isn't so sure as Lapitec is the go to product in our area. And the sales reps over here rely on the fabricators to do their sales for them

The biggest pain is the having to have someone on the saw for the whole job, which means they can't be doing anything else while it's cutting. I have seen GMM have software out now that allows for slow entry/exit speeds etc. But I haven't seen anything about it anywhere and as we only really do 1 Dekton hob every couple of months the costs don't match up yet. Although, if we get the Neolith we'll be pushing for a deal with the software.

[Alex DiPietro]

any cnc saw running easystone or easycut you can automatically slow entry and exit feeds, slow speed for short cuts (i.e less than 10" cuts or whatever you want to define) and you can also set speed based on amps too...

[Shiny Alex]

any cnc saw running easystone or easycut you can automatically slow entry and exit feeds, slow speed for short cuts (i.e less than 10" cuts or whatever you want to define) and you can also set speed based on amps too...

So you set the tool paths in the drawing stage instead of at the saw? We just draw the shape on Draftsight and send them to the saw?

[Dan R.]

Lapitec did not mention the slower ingress/egress saw speeds. Not sure how critical this is with relief cuts.

The important thing is to provide an exit for the accumulated stress build up to escape as the slab is cut. Thus, the slab trimming and cutting toward the relief cuts.

[Dave.Scott]

Sinthered material cutting information from Terminator.

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Capture2.PNG (247.22KiB)Viewed 2176 times

[Shiny Alex]

Any tips on lining up Aura? I've got a 'U' shaped top with breakfast bar and waterfall leg.

I've been googling the colour and some people seem to have got it to line up amazingly, although I do suspect some of the Consentino images maybe a little shopped.

[Voges23]

For what its worth, we got to the point where we were laminating Dekton to 4cm and running a demi or full bullnose. Mitering is great and all, but sometimes folks wanted a B40/V40.

[Dan R.]

Only sometimes?

[Shiny Alex]

Well Aura is a disappointing colour. It just looks like laminate on some white board

[Andrew H]

I'm 99% sure any images from cosentino have been pchopped. We've done the Aura color a couple times and nailed the grain but we use slab smith so I'm cheating. Sorry I can't be of much help.

Eric V....your running router bits on Dekton?!? Man, I can only imagine the sparks running off of that. I wouldn't even entertain that idea.

[amgkitchen]

I just got certified by Dekton and just finished a few projects with colors from Neolith. I am still working on getting the miter better. Any advice?

[Mark Smith]

So was it dekton or neolith? What's the problem you're having with the miters? Chipping? What blade are you using and at what rpm?

[Alex DiPietro]

any cnc saw running easystone or easycut you can automatically slow entry and exit feeds, slow speed for short cuts (i.e less than 10" cuts or whatever you want to define) and you can also set speed based on amps too...

So you set the tool paths in the drawing stage instead of at the saw? We just draw the shape on Draftsight and send them to the saw?

In easystone/cut every blade is set up as a tool with its own parameters. So we have the Dekton blade set to enter and exit at 50% of the feed for 10% the length of the cut. So a 100"cut will enter at 20ipm and stay there for 10" then speed up to 40ipm and then slow down again for the last 10". We also set the blade to run at 50% for "short cuts" that we define as being 12" or less.