More Ceramic Tiles: Upgraded

I’m only used to slate as roofing tiles. Is this what they are, and what sort of dimensions are they ?
John :upside_down_face:

The slate were coasters from Michaels. They look better in the photo. The ceramic tiles are 4.25 inches.

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Thanks.
I think I may have misunderstood your first posting - are the ‘shiny black tiles’ the ceramic ones, rather than polished slate, or some such ?
:upside_down_face:

Was the slate oiled before you engraved it?

I used with olive oil and I wet it before I took a photo to increase the contrast. It is much fainter in normal light, that is why I switched to the tiles.

There are more Beer Stamps available to try. I think they naturally lend themselves to beer coasters.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery/National_Numismatic_Collection/Stamps

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My tung-oiled slate has held it’s contrast well over the months.

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Does it go deep enough to color fill with acrylic paint or similar?

On the slate I’ve done the answer is no. You could mask, cut the mask, peel away the mask and hit it with some spray paint, but due to the uneven surface on most slate it is not a good candidate for this either. I do have some round slate coasters it may work on, but I would expect some wicking up under the mask.

If you hit some slate with enough power a black blob of material bubbles up and out of it. A good start to a 1950s sci-fi flick.

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what you COULD do is use some regular ceramic tile that has some slate look to it. that will engrave much deeper. we did some wood-look ceramic and engraved those with text and painted them.

there was some wicking, but it wasn’t too bad. and i had to hassle my wife a little because she painted it and then waited too long for it to dry and pull the masking off so it wasn’t easy to clean off the wood-look finish. i probably would have pulled it off when the acrylic paint was almost dry and then tried to clean the wicked edges with a damp q-tip.

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Menards by me had 4" square white ceramic tiles for $0.11 each. I just bought a few

Not in my experience.

Ceramic or slate?

I happened to have the Home Depot SKUs if it helps anyone, these are the basic white ceramic tiles (I bought ten of each loose stock, so took photos of the prices and SKU for checkout). I am still pretty basic so haven’t bought the fancypants slate looking ones. Soon.

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The 4x4s are 26c in my Home Depot :slightly_smiling_face: I’m doing 240 of them for a reunion (60 each of 4 different submarine oriented designs).

Wow! wonder why the price difference. I am in Southern California. Would love to hear about other areas. We should start a tile arbitrage market, maybe, hehe

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Could be the cost of trucking it or the perceived ability of the locals to pay. Everything costs more in CT.

I’ve often thought we are in a market that gets a lot of price testing. But we are relatively near a huge port for trade from China,so might be why.

interesting. they’re .11 for me here in the DC area, too. i didn’t think that HD varied their pricing for non-sale/clearance pricing by location in the continental US.

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I used to be able to buy them by the box of 100 but the last time I was there they were only selling them individually - nice little shelf trays for them & everything.

I think they want you to order them for any job bigger than accent tile work. Maybe easier inventory management.

they’re available individually and in boxes of 100 here. :confused: