Description
In this video, “Crafting Masterpieces: The Symphony of Select Materials”, we explore why choosing the right materials is just as important as having the right skills when it comes to creating concrete countertops and other artisanal concrete pieces.
Just like a luthier wouldn’t choose plywood to craft a violin, as a concrete artisan, your choice of materials directly impacts the quality of your creations. We discuss the intricacies of concrete mix design, and the role quality materials play in crafting durable, aesthetically pleasing, and top-tier concrete pieces.
Join us on this enlightening journey, and get ready to level up your skills in concrete crafting!
Transcript
Jeff Girard (00:01):
Recording in progress.
Caleb Lawson (00:03):
Got it.
Jeff Girard (00:04):
All right, well good morning everybody.
Caleb Lawson (00:07):
Good morning. Yeah, go ahead, Jeff.
Jeff Girard (00:10):
I’m Jeff Girard with The Concrete Countertop Institute, and this is Caleb Lawson of Lawson Design. And we’re here with all of you in Interland Interworldland and we’re here to talk about concrete and invite you to join us in a discussion, ask questions, share stories, that sort of thing. We’re here to share our wisdom and experience that we’ve gained over the years. I mean, I’ve been doing this for almost 24 years now, and Caleb’s been doing it for
Caleb Lawson (00:48):
Right at 10,
Jeff Girard (00:48):
Right at 10. So we’ve got some experience under our belt doing that. And we’re here to share our wisdom and knowledge with all of you because we’re all makers, we’re all creators, and we all have success stories to share, wisdom to impart and challenges that we’ve all faced and want to have answers for. So that’s kind of what we’re here for. This is brand new and we want to let everybody know that we’re here and you can talk to us because we’re real people.
Caleb Lawson (01:32):
Well, and I think it’s worth noting. I mean, it’s taken us a long time to get Jeff Girard on podcast. So no, I’m really excited to kind of do this because I’m not sure of many, if any, live kind of format podcasts. And so we’re recording this first episode, which we’re titling Plywood Violin. And we’ll get into that in a minute. And we don’t have a name for the podcast yet, so to be determined, but we were thinking that it would be really neat to do a podcast, but do it in sort of a live setting where the link is out there, the password’s out there. You know, as artisans can join us, ask questions and have totally off the cuff answers, we’re going to try and limit it to 35-40 minutes so that we’re not just taking up a ton of time to people who need to get back and be makers. You can see I’m in my shop right now and after this we’ll be jumping up to make a kitchen island. So yeah, that’s really excited. So Jeff, why have we titled this Plywood Violin? Just jump right into it.
Jeff Girard (02:51):
What an absurd concept, right? And that’s the whole point is plywood violins. Now, who the heck would even think about doing that? And it’s a point that I’m going to circle back to a few months ago I made a post that purposefully had a provocative title called Mix Doesn’t Matter, or something to that effect. And the reason why I titled it that, and the reason why I said those things was to get people to think, to have a discussion like this. And there was a couple people who kind of misunderstood the intent, maybe they didn’t read it, but I’m not saying, I’ve never said that any mix can do anything, right?
Caleb Lawson (03:39):
Nor are you saying the materials don’t matter,
Jeff Girard (03:40):
Right? Nor am I saying the materials don’t matter because that, that’s absurd too. The point is what we do, our visions of making something either for ourselves or our customers or for whomever, there’s a body of knowledge and experience and procedures and tools and materials that all flow into that that make us successful. And you can’t isolate one of those things and say, all you need is this. Everything else is secondary. It all it, it’s a holistic process. And I’m going to use the example of if you build a house, people who build houses understand this. We we’re going to focus on materials. Cause plywood, violins, there’s a whole spectrum of wood products that are used in building a house. There’s dimensional lumber, two by fours, two by six is that sort of thing. There’s OSB, there’s plywood, and then you get more sophisticated, specialized things like glue lams and LVLs that are used in specific applications.
Jeff Girard (04:48):
But all of those products are commonly used to build houses and they’re well suited for that. And in the building industry, the materials have evolved and the processes have evolved to be efficient and cost effective, meet building codes, let people do what they want to do and all that. And so within the context of that arena of building a house, you have this smorgasborg materials you can choose from. Maybe use wood studs, maybe use metal studs, or maybe you do something else, but you’re okay within that arena using those materials. But if I now want to make a violin, I would never ever think of using any kind of wood to make a violin. I couldn’t make a wood violin out of a two by four or out of a sheet of plywood or out of a glue and beams.
Caleb Lawson (05:49):
No, if you did, it probably wouldn’t sound very good because the resonances and all of that, exactly. If I’m not mistaken, it’s maple and spruce that make violins. I don’t remember exactly what the pieces and parts, the top versus sides and bottom and things like that. But they’re used because of the way that they make the violin sound.
Jeff Girard (06:05):
That’s a really good point because it’s not just the material that’s important, but what are you doing with it? I could take a chunk of maple or a chunk of spruce and I could carve a block of wood of the right kind of wood to look like a violin, and it would be perfect in every detail, especially if I was a very, very highly skilled artist and who knew how to carve wood. But it still wouldn’t be a violin. It would be a chunk of wood that looked like a violin. So when you do something, when you make something, especially if you make something that has a lot of function or purpose or elegance to it, there’s a broader and deeper understanding beyond just what material do I make it out of? What’s important about that material? So if you’re building a house, who cares about the resonant quality of a two by four, right? That’s not even an issue. But if I’m making a violin, that is the quintessential paramount number one thing about picking this piece of wood versus this piece of wood.
Caleb Lawson (07:10):
Well, you think a lot about acoustic guitars. Absolutely. If we’re on the musical instrument topic, you think about there are steel guitars, there are a ton of different, a seagull is maybe made with a different wood than a Gibson, and they truly do sound different. The difference between an nylon strings and steel strings, the difference between, and there are different grades of those. And I’m not a guitar player, so I can’t speak to that per se, but a Fender Rhodes piano stage piano sounds a heck of a lot different than a bosendorfer grand piano. And what are you doing with it? You know, think about casting tables, right? I had in my old shop, I inherited a casting table from Chuck, the guy I bought my company from that was primarily made of, what are those? The beams that are plywood and then the two,
Caleb Lawson (08:06):
I don’t know the name, I
Caleb Lawson (08:07):
Don’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head. Somebody will correct me, it’s fine, but it, they’re very stiff. They’re floor joists. And then I, in my younger artisan years, made a casting table where it was just a horizontal wall. It was two by sixes, I think. And while that was functional, it did not stay true because of the properties of dimensional lumber. Dimensional
Jeff Girard (08:34):
Lumber is it twists it warm
Caleb Lawson (08:36):
Twists. And so my current casting table is glue lams because that’s a much more stable way to make a casting table. So I think there’s a perception out there that it’s one or the other, that it’s either wisdom, experience, education, knowledge is the paramount thing, or materials are the paramount thing. And I think it’s both. And I think that’s where combination, what I hope to do, and this is a broad overarching, me being pie in the sky, big picture kind of thing. But what I hope to do in being involved in the industry and being involved in teaching with you, Jeff, is it’s like we are all trying to make quality concrete. We’re all trying to be good artisans. We’re all trying to make something better. So let’s jump out there into the community, into the world with the information and the knowledge to help people do that.
Jeff Girard (09:34):
Yeah, that’s, that’s why I started CCI going on, it’s going to be 20 years next year. So 20 years ago
Caleb Lawson (09:43):
We’ve got to do something big. We’ve got to do a party for the absolutely 20th year ultimate course. Yeah.
Jeff Girard (09:51):
So let’s kind of turn it back to concrete. One of the very first pieces that I made, I can go back, I’m an engineer, for those of you who don’t know, I’m an engineer. And so this is my latest log book, like stuff. I have dozens of these and I can go back to day one and look at the very first concrete recipe that I made, what I made, what color it was, all that. That’s just me. Not everybody does that, but that’s just me. I, because I like to keep track of things and look at, well, what worked and what done. So I don’t have to keep it up here, I keep it in here. But the first thing I made was this little side table, and there might be a picture of it on my website somewhere. It’s a two foot square, gray exposed black aggregate, and it’s got my hand print in it.
Jeff Girard (10:47):
So it’s just a little end table that I made. And I made it with, I don’t know, Quikrete 5,000 or Sacrete, whatever. Whatever I got at the local Lowe’s or Home Depot, it doesn’t matter. The point being is I took a material that has been tailored for the DIYer and the contractor who wants to pour sidewalk or set a fence post or whatever. And I took it and I used it in a way that was a little outside of its normal capabilities. And through my knowledge of the importance of water cement ratio and using superplasticizer and all that other stuff, I didn’t get too fancy with it because this was a long time ago. And this was just my very early baby steps of stepping into this world, which was just a new idea in the late nineties. And I was able to make something that was pretty modest, modest scope, modest in scale, it cast fine, ground fine, polish fine, and it still heavy.
Jeff Girard (12:01):
And to an outside casual observer, especially to somebody who doesn’t really understand our needs, what we’re trying to do and why we use the kind of concrete we do, you might be mistaken. And it would be certainly understandable that you could say, wow, I could just go to home, the Home Depot and buy the $4 bag of concrete and then do stuff with it. Cause sure, I mean that’s, sorry, my dog’s. Well, you did. You can’t. And I did. I did. But I can’t do anything with that. I can’t make a lounge chair out of that. I can’t make, see that gray thing up there? That is a lampshade and it’s an eighth of an inch thick concrete. I can’t do that with a bag of concrete, especially when it’s got half inch aggregate, especially when it’s got half inch aggregate inch. So material does matter. Ingredients matter. Your typical bag of concrete has three ingredients. It’s got gravel, it’s got sand, and it’s got Portland cement and that’s it. And the most expensive ingredients, the Portland Cement, and it has the least amount of that in it. And that’s why you can buy a 60 or 80 pound bag of concrete for, well, it used to be four or five bucks, probably it’s more now, but you’re not getting a whole lot of performance out of it. But for most applications, you don’t need a whole lot of performance.
Jeff Girard (13:29):
The mix in this case does matter, but I was able to do something very modest with it. So in that case, it didn’t matter. Another example is a long time ago I did a big cast in place, bar top and a yacht club. And I had to make, I needed so much concrete, I ordered it from a truck, but I didn’t just order any concrete. I worked with the plant manager, plant engineer, simply because I wanted to substitute gray cement out and put in white cement and I wanted to use polin. So we worked on that and I wanted to use Superplasticizer to cut down on the water, and I used the shrinkage reducer in there. So I was able to tweak the mix because I knew what was important in the mix.
Jeff Girard (14:25):
So the mix that was being delivered was not a conventional batch plant mix. It happened to come from a batch plant, it happened to be delivered in a concrete truck, and it happened to be placed in a conventional way, sled down the chute into a wheelbarrow, brought in dump, screed, all that. So to a casual outside observer, it looks like, oh, I can just use any mix and get away with it. Now in this particular instance, it worked out really well because the bones of the mix were really good. And that’s why I talked to the plant engineers say, Hey, what’s a good mix that has these characteristics? And I’m going to take that good stuff and make it even better through knowing what ingredients to add, what extra spices, so to speak, how to tweak it and tailor it. So for folks who make concrete countertops, sinks, furniture, whatever, there’s lots of you out there and it’s really exciting to see that you have a big spectrum of tools to use to draw from. You could make it well,
Caleb Lawson (15:29):
And that spectrum has gotten bigger, much absolutely bigger since you started. Even since I started. I mean 10 years ago, it was still not super common to be able to use a blended bag mix and bag mixes
Jeff Girard (15:44):
Really didn’t exist back then.
Caleb Lawson (15:46):
No. I mean I remember, and a lot of, you’ll remember when the buddy Rhode blended mixes started to come out. And so it’s just changed a lot. And there’s a lot to be said for a blended mix because we’ve got cemental, which is great. We’ve got a couple of others that are out there, they’re great. And they were not available when we all started or when a lot of us started. And so I think it’s really cool to see a lot of really strong materials coming into the market that are tailored and developed specifically to help us as artisans. And so I think that’s really, really exciting.
Jeff Girard (16:29):
It certainly makes things a lot easier for a lot more folks to be successful.
Caleb Lawson (16:34):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think really the issue, and not even issue, but the paramount importance in my mind is, okay, we’ve got all these ingredients, we’ve got really amazing things. You can go buy a Ferrari crate motor for an affordable price, let’s say, but maybe you don’t know how to build the Ferrari or how to set
Jeff Girard (17:02):
Up a suspension
Caleb Lawson (17:04):
Or how to mount the motor. And so I think where I’m coming into it from a perspective point of view is like, cool, go buy those materials. We we’re excited that they’re available, but I want to be a part of helping in that understanding of why is this in here? How is it helping me? If there’s an issue, how can I troubleshoot it? I want to, this is a totally kind of off the wall example, but I think a lot about back in the, I don’t know, 16, I guess 16, 17 hundreds when the Catholic church was all that was around and the Bible was in Latin and people could not understand it unless they were sitting in mass listening to the priest. And then the printing press came out and the Bible got translated into languages that people could understand. And now we’re able to look at it and say, oh, wait.
Caleb Lawson (18:05):
And priest was not actually saying the thing that the book said. And so in other words, my point being, I want Jeff and I want to help you be able to interpret the thing. We want to translate it into a language that you can understand so that yes, use the bag mix. Yes, create your mix from scratch. Yes, use x sealer. Yes, use wise sealer, but understand what your concrete is doing. And so that’s where I get really excited about the materials being very good right now is because yes, we have a broader spectrum of people who are capable of being successful now, but we also really feel like the knowledge is super still super important.
Jeff Girard (18:48):
What I got started, I’m coming from a background where concrete is a utilitarian. It’s one of the most basic utilitarian materials. I mean my master’s degree, one of those up there. I can’t point backwards one of those. I have a master’s in degrees engineers. Yeah, doesn’t mean anything, right? I work in dirt, build things out of dirt. It’s the most basic oldest building material.
Caleb Lawson (19:20):
You are a geotechnical engineer, correct?
Jeff Girard (19:22):
Geotechnical engineer. Concrete is very similar. It behaves the rules of soil before it sets and it behaves the rules of rock mechanics after it sets. So there’s a lot of overlap. And one of my favorite classes in undergrad was reinforced concrete design. I mean, in fact, one of my textbooks from undergrad was this design and control of concrete mixtures by the Portland Cement Association. This was one of my textbooks. This talks about concrete mix design. This is how I am knowledgeable in how to make my own concrete mixes and how all the ingredients work together because I learned in school, that’s what we do. Concrete’s one of the few building material, me one, the few building materials where it’s designed for the application. So if you’re going to build a house out of wood, you know, don’t grow your own trees and pick, well, I’m, I’m going to use walnut for this and a violin, you’re going to use spruce for some parts.
Jeff Girard (20:28):
You’re going to use maple. Maple for other parts and maybe the actual fingerboard thing, Ebony, for specific reasons in concrete, somebody, it’s almost always an engineer. And the more challenging the application, if you’re going to build a bridge or a Skype scraper or something like that, that mix is tailored for that application. But it takes into context of, okay, we need to get rocks. We need a lot of rocks. We’re not going to like import rocks from out of state Italy. That’s too expensive. We’re going to use what we have here. So the characteristics of our local materials have to be taken into account because in civil structures, airports, bridges, that sort of thing. Cost is an important factor because there’s so much of material used. So you factor in things like how, what’s the fuel rate and how far do I have to drive it?
Jeff Girard (21:28):
And how easy is it to extract? And what are the characteristics and all those, there’s lots that go into it, and I don’t want to overcomplicate things, but it’s not just, well, what strength do I need? And it’s not just who’s concrete am I using? It’s tailored to the project. Whereas if I’m melding a, I’m going to weld something up with steel, I pick what kind of steel I’m using mild a 36 steel, or I’m going to use some other steel, structural steel. I don’t make the steel, I just pick the material. So we’re using material that we make. We don’t buy a sheet of concrete and then cut it up and build stuff like the granite industry does. We make our material and because we are the manufacturers of our material, we’re starting with raw materials. And when we bring those raw materials together, it’s kind of incumbent on us to understand how those materials work.
Jeff Girard (22:28):
Just like a bakery chef, they’re going to make a cake, whether they use a box mix or they make from scratch mix. They still have to know everything that goes together, how to bake it properly, how to substitute ingredients to get better characteristics. Maybe they want it moisture or maybe they want it fluffy or whatever. So there’s a field of knowledge that’s necessary to have that goes beyond just what’s in the box or in the little containers of flour and sugar and things like that. Those are the important building blocks, and they’re very important. And whether you choose to make a from scratch cake or a box cake mix, maybe the end result is the same. It doesn’t matter to the person eating it. If it’s done well, if it’s put together properly, if it’s presented well, if the care and expertise of the person making the cake is high enough and as imbued enough of their skill and passion into it, then the experience of the consumer is the same.
Caleb Lawson (23:35):
And well, and I think one point that I’d like to interject there is, let’s say you are a baker and you’re using a box cake mix, these box cake mixes, and certainly I’m making the tie to blended concrete mixes here are made in a batch plant. Fine. I use a lot of CSA, I use a lot of rapid at cemental, and there have been plenty of times where I buy it at Home Depot and I know that there’s, there mixes just a shade different in the Home Depot home centers than it is if you buy it direct from cts and things like that. So there have been instances where it’s been overloaded with superplasticizer. There have been instances where the sand has been less. Yes. And I’ve had to compensate and figure out what that is. And so my point, our point here is, okay, what if you run into a problem? Sure, you can call the company and they can send you more mix and that solves that problem. But in the moment you’re casting a piece, what do you do? Right? If you have no idea what’s in the mix, you’re just using the mix because this’s the best mix out there. And it might be not be, I don’t know, you don’t know. But if you don’t know how to handle a situation that requires an undergirding knowledge of the material you’re using, then you’re going to be stumped by that problem.
Jeff Girard (25:00):
I get these questions a lot. It’s a very common situation. Let’s set the quality of the material aside. This has nothing to do with product quality because there’s some very, very good, when we’re dealing with the kind of boutique concrete where we can work with, we’re working with very, very specialized, very expensive concrete. It offers a lot, it provides a lot, promises a lot. We demand a lot of it. Even if I have a fantastic mix, whether I make it, I design it, I buy, it doesn’t matter. Let’s take somebody who is just a user of some generic Acme concrete mix. They just go get something, bite off the internet, boom. They start using it and they get this superplasticizer and they use too much superplasticizer because they really want to make it flowable. They want to pourer, they want to do a direct cast, they want to pour their concrete, but they don’t understand how superplasticizer work or how important it is not to overdose.
Jeff Girard (26:10):
And now they put too much in and they get segregation and they get all the sand settling to the bottom and all the cement cream that’s now super fluid. So it looks like scummy water that rises to the top and be a lot of super plasticizers start to foam when you use too much of them. So they get all this foamy scum on the top and they’re like, uhoh, what do I do? What happened? And that’s an indication of just using materials that are really good, but without really understanding how to use them. Well, another, going back to the building example, is I can go to Harbor Freight and buy a, I don’t know, I, I’m just making this up. I can buy a hundred dollars chop saw, maybe it’s less, maybe it’s more, but bear with me and it will cut two by fours just fine.
Jeff Girard (27:04):
Last year I built a shed. I could have used, used a hand saw, I bought out a yard sale. And although it would’ve been in inefficient, it would’ve cut the two by four s just fine. On the flip side, I can go buy a Fess Tool CapEx 1617, $1,800. Chop saw. That is ultra precise. That is excellent for high quality trim work and furniture building and things like that. They both do the same job. And although one is probably going to last longer, probably does a better job. Both cut. The difference is, and this is something that neither one of these, whether it’s the best, most expensive or the cheapest or whatever, neither will tell me where to put that cut or how to do it. Right? It’s just a tool. The concrete is just a tool. It doesn’t tell you how to use it, how to be successful. It’s just a material. And there’s a trap that people assume that if I’m using a really good mix because Jeff Gerard says you should use this mix, that I don’t need to think about anything else.
Caleb Lawson (28:17):
Well, I think too, there are instructions on the mix designs, right? There’d get a good high quality blended mix from one of the great providers we have in this industry. And it will tell you, use this ratio of water for this, so use a 0.32 or we all know the numbers use X water and X plasticizer for X result.
Jeff Girard (28:43):
Sound guidelines.
Caleb Lawson (28:44):
Sound guidelines, absolutely. But as some of, I have done beta and alpha testing for some of Jess’s materials, and what we learned in that process is I have a rim craft mini mixer, and that’s what I do most of my mixing in. I do it in 150, 160 pound batches. I mix it fast. And I have to use realistically about half the superplasticizer that Jeff does with his, he’s doing a lot of testing and things like that with a column X, single head mixer. Both are effective tools for the job. Both are high quality tools for the job, but because of the mechanics of my mix mixer, I have to use less plasticizer to achieve the same result. And if I were to use the amount of plasticizer Jeff uses, mine would segregate like unbelievably. I mean, I’ve had it happen. And I think that being able to troubleshoot those things is a super, super important thing. So I don’t want to be controversial. I don’t want to be calling it calling this endeavor that Jeff and I are starting right now, has no bearing on anybody else. We’re not trying to call anybody out. We’re not trying to, I want zero drama. I am. I’m a no drama kind of guy, but I think it’s important to open a live dialogue.
Jeff Girard (30:13):
Absolutely. While you were talking at a point. And then it’s evaporated because my dog came in and wants, wants me to pet him. And it’s like, hang on buddy. It circling back to your ingredients and the knowledge that you need, at the end of the day, what we all want to do is make something that is beautiful, that we’re proud of, that our clients are going to be happy with and not just happy with when they hand you the check, but five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years down the line, we want to create something, a legacy we’re proud of that we can look back and say, I made this right. We all want that. That’s the passion that burns within us that we want to create something that we can be proud of. And using the right kind of concrete, not the bag concrete mix from a home center, but a mix that’s appropriate for the kinds of things we’re doing, that’s important.
Jeff Girard (31:28):
And knowing which mix to use is part of that, in that knowledge base, knowing how concrete works, knowing the importance of the water cement ratio, knowing that super plasticizers exist, knowing how they work, how to manipulate them, how pigments work, how all that stuff works, reinforcing that. So one, my first big challenge of stepping into this industry was there were a lot of misconceptions about how reinforcing works. And unfortunately, there’s still a lot of that that goes on. And my first standard that my flag that I was waving was, Hey, reinforcing is important because this is in the pre G F rrc days, you had to use steel reinforcing. If you put it in the wrong place, it doesn’t work. You just can’t put it anywhere. So, and this kind of reminds me of something somebody shared with me. I saw, they shared me a video of this and, and one of his employees were installing this somewhat large countertop, 10, 12 foot long. In the old days, that was big. And nowadays that’s not really that big. And while they were installing it, sitting on the cabinet says they were laying it down, it snapped in two, it just shattered.
Caleb Lawson (32:52):
It’s an experience I’ve had many times. I, I’ve, in the early days,
Jeff Girard (32:56):
Never seen that happen, but here I am watching a video, so I’m going to say, Hey, what? What’s going on? And it turns out they said, I used this really good mix and I did everything. I did everything I was supposed to. And yet just in the act of laying it down, and I couldn’t see if there was any twisting that happened or anything like that, it looked like everything was going, but obviously something didn’t. It literally snapped in two pieces. And I think
Caleb Lawson (33:29):
What lesson is had that experience before GFRC, but
Jeff Girard (33:32):
Yeah, before GFRC, the lesson is it’s not just the material you have to pick, you understand, well, why do you do make things a certain way? Why do you use certain kinds of fibers? Why do you put reinforcing in certain locations? Why are things handled a certain way? Why is it important to have flat cabinets and not have a high spot in the middle? So it’s the greater context of knowledge that lets you be successful and have a positive, successful experience. The message that we’re bringing forth is we want to look at the big picture, not just one little slice of something.
Caleb Lawson (34:14):
Absolutely. And I think that’s a really good segue into a closing because we are, we’re trying really hard to keep this under 35, 40 minutes, but I think this is a good beginning. Absolutely. And hopefully plenty of people watch this and think, Ooh, I’d love to ask a question or join and into the conversation. And so yeah, we want this to be a conversation. So come on, next time we’re going to be doing this, I believe every Wednesday morning at 8:00 AM Eastern standard time. Yes. So we’ll post a link to various Facebook groups just before we get live password included or whatever. I don’t know how exactly we’re going to format it, but we’ll post a link and y’all can join. So bring it on next time and maybe we’ll have a name next time, so,
Jeff Girard (35:06):
All
Caleb Lawson (35:07):
Right. Awesome. Well, thanks to those of you who are going to be watching this when we post it and hope y’all have a great day.
Jeff Girard (35:13):
Thanks. Take care, guys. All
Caleb Lawson (35:15):
Right. See ya.