Creative In Counters Washington DC

Darrin Mikk, owner of Creative In Counters in Mount Airy, Md., started like many solid surface shop owners, with limited resources and an overwhelming desire to succeed, and over the lifespan of his business, he has done just that.

When Creative In Counters first opened its doors, he and his few employees manually fabricated only solid surface out of a 2,000-sq.-ft. shop.

Now, the company's showroom alone is 5,000 sq. ft. and it offers not only solid surface, but also quartz surfacing and natural stone. The company does about 90 percent of its business with kitchen and bath dealers, remodelers and builders, with the remaining 10 percent being sales direct to the customer.

Creative In Counter's manufacturing facility is now 19,000 sq. ft complete with a full line of modern equipment, and the company employs 35 people.

"We were doing only solid surface for about 10 to12 years," said Mikk. "But two years ago we opened up our current facility, ready to fabricate engineered stone and granite."

The addition of quartz and granite to the shop was a business decision Mikk said he felt the company had to make, with those products doing so well in the marketplace.

Broadening The Horizons

Rather than starting out small in the hard surfaces side, the company came onboard with a variety of machinery for handling quartz and granite, including an overhead crane system, CNC machining center, bridge saw and a splash machine for edge profiling.

Having already introduced CNC machinery into his shop for processing solid surface, Mikk was very familiar with the technology and embraced it with open arms. However, it wasn't without its trials.

"One of the trickiest steps was figuring out how to set up the shop properly," said Mikk. "There have still been some growing pains on that. We're Corian guys. We didn't have much experience with the granite world. When we got into it we took the philosophy that the machines were better off doing the labor. We didn't have a lot of people that knew how to fabricate granite, so we went with the machines first that could actually fabricate it and get us into the trade a little quicker."

As soon as the company brought e-stone and granite into its product mix, sales took off for the new offerings, leading to half of its work going to the hard surface products. However, with the boom taking place in those materials, almost two thirds of the projects coming in the door are now going to quartz surfacing and granite. Creative In Counters is going through an average of about 200 sheets of solid surface and 250 slabs of quartz and natural stone per month.

"In the actual shop layout, we have part of it dedicated to the dry fabrication process and part of it wet," explained Mikk. "I've seen where shops actually wet cut both [stone and solid surface], and that's one thing we're hoping for down the road. If solid surface goes to a 3cm standard, we could use the same machinery for both."

Mikk admits that adding natural stone to the company's offerings was not as easy as he would have preferred it, but with the help of the right staff, eventually the learning curve was surpassed. "It took us a year, but we finally were able to find the right group of people who helped design systems to succeed in the granite fabrication," he said.

In addition to finding the right people, investing in the right technology is on the top of the list for Creative In Counters when it comes to finding efficiencies. "Fabricators have to have an open mind to using the new technologies," said Mikk. "You have to be willing to grow and become highly technical on some things. If you do, you're going to be a lot better off."

One such technology is the FARO Arm digital templating system. "The FARO templating system allows us to template digitally right in the customer's kitchen so they can see their countertop being drawn right there on a laptop," said Mikk. "The drawing is produced as a DXF file which goes right on our CNC with a few modifications. It really saves us time."

Another technology that the company has invested in is a waterjet cutting system, which is relatively new to the surfacing industry.

Cutting With Water

Waterjet technology, while newer to the surfacing industry, has been around for a number of years in the metal fabrication and food processing industries. The process by which waterjet machinery cuts is called cold supersonic erosion, in which a high-pressure stream of water mixed with an abrasive (most commonly the semiprecious stone garnet) cuts with relative ease. Abrasive waterjets can be used to cut materials up to 10 in. thick, with high precision and solid repeatability. The same parameters, such as water pressure, abrasive flow rates and type of cutting nozzle, are generally used no matter what material is being cut on abrasive waterjet machinery, with the main variable being speed. This means changing the material being cut offers a fast setup and leaves little room for operator error.

Waterjets are becoming more common in hard surface shops for rough cutting. Although the saw is generally much quicker for this type of operation, waterjet machinery can cut curved and complex shapes, such as an inside radius, on countertops.

The system Creative In Counters purchased early in 2006 was Northwood Stoneworks' SawJET, which combines a bridge saw and a waterjet. Because the saw is much faster for straight cuts, but is incapable of cutting shapes, this type of machine allows a complete countertop blank to be made, using the saw for speed on the straight cuts and the waterjet on any radius or inside corner. According to Mikk, this makes the rest of the process much quicker.

"Before we had our waterjet, we rough cut all the parts on the bridge saw, blocking out the corners, and then we moved them onto the CNCs," explained Mikk. "The CNC would come in and cut that square corner and we'd use the finger bit, which was very slow cutting. Now, because we've cut it to size with the waterjet, we actually go to a bigger Z-80 tool, which is like a very large finger bit that runs in a third of the time. Where the finger bit would have taken maybe 45 minutes to cut, now it takes about 25 minutes."

And with the digital templating process in place, a DXF file is generated near automatically that can be put directly on the waterjet/saw combo to cut the rough blanks of the actual countertop. Mikk said that in addition to the labor savings he gets better material yield. "We're saving a huge amount of time with each top; at least 25 percent, and [the waterjet] cuts your tops closer in the corners so you can actually use more out of the sheet.

"We have a lot of production right now, and we're trying to get more and more jobs through," said Mikk. "Everything's done on the jobsite, thrown right to the computer, modified a little bit and moved right onto the waterjet, which cuts all the blanks out, and that particular machine will now feed our three CNCs."

Avoiding Missteps

While this methodology has worked well for Creative In Counters, Mikk cautioned that the templating process must be error-free or mistakes are unlikely to be caught before an expensive material has been wasted.

He also said there were no issues getting the system up and running because he had a knowledgable staff familiar with CNC operation. "If someone doesn't know how to operate a CNC machine, then they're going to have a learning curve; otherwise it should be no problem," said Mikk, although he did say, like with any machine, there will be some trial and error at first.

"At first, we saw some corner breakage for our e-stone, but we quickly realized if we water-jet the corners first and then saw, it pretty much eliminates that problem," he said of his own experience. "That seemed to solve 90 percent of problems. Water-jetting the corners first seemed to take away the stress that caused the cracking for us."

With granite, he said there were no problems at all, and the equipment had saved time they used to spend cutting relief corners.

The company has yet to try the waterjet out on solid surface. "That's still something we're toying with," explained Mikk. "We brought it in solely for the stone right now because we have a CNC that dry cuts very fast and I don't know if the time savings are going to be there. Down the road we may start playing around a little bit with the idea."

He also said he wasn't sure if his water filtration system was ready to handle all of the dust generated from cutting solid surface on the waterjet.

Evaluating The Factors

Mikk pointed out that the abrasives for waterjet cutting are not inexpensive, but he says the fact that his machine combines the saw allows significant savings there. He also cautioned jumping into a new technology without having done the homework to make an informed decision.

"When people look at machines, they should make sure it's worthwhile for their business," he said. "They need to know how they're going to feed the machines. Part of the key to going with some of these high-end technologies is the ability to keep them running constantly, to get the payoff out of them."

He also urged researching the company offering the machinery before making a purchase to ensure it meets all of the needs that may arise.

In closing Mikk offered a few words to the wise: "You always have to have that open mind, that willingness to understand things and to change. There's a reason machinery like this is out there and it does work. Finding the right machines will often fill that void when the experienced labor market is lacking."

For more information contact Darrin Mikk at Creative In Counters, 2704 Back Acre Circle. Mount Airy, MD 21771, 301-829-7991, dmikk@creativeincounters.com www.creativeincounters.com.

Editor Kevin Cole can be reached at editor@surfacefabrication.com