Setting mosaic panels

[Musivarius]

HI,

I've just joined the forum, if you haven't seen my thread on the new members page I'm a mosaicist who specialises in reproducing Roman mosaic floors using marble. Mostly my work has been for museums but I'm now looking to get more private work for larger floor pieces.

I create mosaic panels using 10mm cubes with 1-3mm gaps between them. The marble pieces are glued onto mesh, the panels vary in size.

The question, if you had someone wanting you to lay a floor using these panels how difficult would you consider it, if at all? There are a couple of specialist companies I've heard of who do this but I was wondering if it's something outside of what a competent tiler could do?

I did a private job a few years back for a chaps garden. He needed 108 mosaic panels to form a border, each panel being 300mm by 140mm, 10mm thick. When I delivered them the tilers he had in to lay the panels in a recess between a load of Travertine slabs insisted I grout all the panels and let them set before they would lay them. They were then handling mosaic tiles where the only thing keeping them 'straight' was about 2mm of grout, so I saw a number of them folding over.

I assume they wanted to do it like this so they didn't have to come back again but it struck me as a bit of a messy way to work when they could of just set them as mesh panels and then grouted them. Unfortunately I didn't have the experience at the time to speak up.

Hopefully I've explained this clearly, any opinions?

Lawrence

[deanotile]

I have seen this method used on paper faced mosaics but personally I do not use this method.