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Question:
What exactly is a resinated stone?
Our answer on this matter:
About 10 years ago, most manufacturers of stone slabs, mostly in Brazil, started to resinate natural stone slabs. That means that after the slabs are cut and grinded to dimension, the slabs are put on a vacuum table and coated with a layer of epoxy resin. Therefore, imperfections, natural cavities, hairline fissures, and fractures of any kind, are filled with epoxy. After that, the stone gets its final polish, which in an ideal case removes over 99% of the applied epoxy resin. The result is a stronger stone with a very uniform, highly polished surface.
Question:
Are resinated stones a good or bad thing to have?
Our opinion on this matter:
Volar Design is still undecided on this matter.
On the one hand side, if done right, the strength and durability of the stone are improved and it is possible to process stones now, which would have been impossible 20 years ago.
On the other hand, it opens new doors for greed, selling low-grade material (which would have normally ended up as gravel), and cutting corners on the final polishing of the stone slabs. For example, we did run into some stone slabs, where the resin was obviously not an epoxy resin (cheap polyester instead) poured on a wet stone without any vacuum, and barely polished. The stone looked fine on first sight, but turned out to be completely unusable. After that, we learned that this particular supplier seemed to specialize on junk material. Since then, we avoid this company and inspect slabs even more thoroughly than before. Another negative side effect is that it creates more and more unrealistic expectations how natural stone really looks. We had it happen that customers were complaining about the natural look of their high quality non-resinated stone, because they compared it to the superficial shine of their neighbor’s countertop, which was mostly synthetic.