Tiling large area - Spacers or no spacers?

[rob]

Great info guys, gives me a few new ways to try. Thanks

 

[sWe]

Mmmm, is hanging a Swedish thing ? my Brothers ex partner spent a lot of time there tiling.

It's unusal for Swedish tilers to use spacers. The absolute majority of the time, tiles are "hung". When the tiles are too heavy, battens and rope are generally used.

i ping lines and tile to them, from time to time i check joints are still evenly spaced and true

never used the rope method , is it a quicker way of keeping a consistant grout line and how does it deal with the variation in tile size

It's easier to compensate for differing tile-sizes using rope than it is using spacers, because the rope can be compressed without affecting other tiles noticably. Rope is especially useful when tiling very large vertical surfaces. Batten, fix the first row, place a length of rope on top of that row, and then slap up every other tile, and then go back and fill in the gaps. The best example of this I can think of, is when I tiled a series of large walls in a bathhouse in 2007. The total meterage was over 100sqm, and the biggest section was about 9 metres high. Used several thousand tiles, which measured 125x125*20mm, with 10mm grout lines. Each tile weighed something like 1,5kg, and slipped continuosly in the adhesive I had been supplied with, when unsupported. I battened the entire length, and on the biggest segment, which was about 5m wide and about 9 metres high at the highest point, I was able to fix about one row every four or so minutes. One row was about two boxes, and each box held 20 tiles.

It's still important to choose a good adhesive with good slump resistance and a setting time suited to your working pace.
This was the main problem for me on that job, because I could only do about 10 rows before having to leave everything to set for an hour or so, because if I did more the weight of the tiles started to compress the rope furthest down a mm or two. I had complained to the customer that the adhesive had too long open time and too little slump resistance before I started, but they wouldn't listen. They ended up paying for it though, as it took more than twice as long to fix the tiles, given that I couldn't do more than ten rows before being forced to downtime. They complained alot, but as I said to them, I can't do magic.

Overall, it's a good method for large areas and/or heavy tiles, and it's really fast when fixing tiles in bulk, but it's still a bad idea to skrimp on materials.

 

[lucius]

Sorry Swe thought you were joking when you said you used rope, sounds an interesting method to me never heard of it i wonder if their is a Vid on You Tube or somewhere showing it being done.
Lucius.

 

[rob]

sounds an interesting method to me never heard of it i wonder if their is a Vid on You Tube or somewhere showing it being done.
Lucius.

If any body finds one I would like to see it too. Or if anyone has some photos they can post?

 

[Alan.P]

I did a couple of searches on youtube for it, not a thing, basically, once you have your addy bed on the wall and your first row set, you then lay the string lightly into the addy along the length of your run, fix the next row down onto the string lightly and repeat the string stage etc etc, when your tiles are fixed pull out the string, one draw back, watch what your using, you don't want the old 'hairy' type as that leave strands behind that can be a pain to remove.

 

[Perry]

on large floors with large tiles with 2 mm joints on rectified tiles on bad floors i couldn't see it could be done without spacers I use model making matches the tiles would move all over the place on smaller tiles or bigger joints i would grid it with chalk lines ete