The Trials of Transport

If you started out in the stone industry when I did, you’ll remember the lack of readily available or affordable alternatives to the wooden frame. In many cases, and with varying degrees of success, an A-frame constructed to hold slabs was adapted and used to haul finished pieces.
These frames were heavy, the wood was always warped, and the frame angle was sometimes dangerously steep. I doubt any of us remember one of those things nostalgically.
Thankfully, a worker entering the countertop industry today will probably never have to wrestle one of those monsters. With training schools instead of “lift-and-learn” apprenticeships, electronic templating overtaking glued together sticks, and pre-colored seam adhesive used in place of leaky colorant tubes, mastering this trade has never been as organized or easy.
Along with those advances, stone-transport frames have come a long way. Well-designed, durable, and affordable metal transport frames are now the norm in much of the industry. Frames mounted on the inside and outside of vans and trucks are also making the job of moving countertops much easier.
Does that mean the days of pieces broken or damaged in transport are over? Yes and no. The numbers will certainly be reduced with improved equipment. But a frame, however intelligently designed, still needs to be loaded with planning and care in order to avoid costly mishaps.
The first two things to take into account when loading a frame are the order of installation and the length of the pieces. One of your templater’s duties could be to plan the most-efficient order for installing countertops and document it for the installers and workers loading the frame.
In an ideal world, the pieces to be installed first are always the ones that go on the frame last. Realistically, this is a difficult thing to achieve, especially if your company creates countertop pieces that “L” instead of seam at the corner.
Safe transport is the most important thing, especially when it comes to sink and cooktop cutouts. To safely support these, sometimes you’ll need to load out of installation order. Despite the difficulty, it’s a good practice to try on a consistent basis for two reasons.
First, the fewer times you have to move a piece to get to the one behind it, the less likely any piece gets damaged or broken. Sometimes there’s no good place to stage a piece you’re moving out of the way, and when you’re in a rush there’s a tendency to just lean pieces against truck tires, tool boxes, etc.
As a result, there’s always the possibility that pieces can be tipped over. Then you’ve got a broken part of a installation and a lousy explanation for it.
A drywall cart positioned in a safe location can be a great place to stage multiple pieces if you need to, but just make sure you don’t bury your cart and then realize you need it for a heavy piece.
Another possible solution is to have a half-frame against the sidewall of your truck. This can be handy for staging and overflow of pieces, but it can’t be too wide or it will get in the way of a guy walking with one end of a piece.
The second argument for planning is that the fewer times you move a countertop, the less energy you expend. On a big job, a poorly planned load can add a lot of effort to an already long day. Taking the extra time to position the pieces on the frame really pays for itself in that situation.
In order to plan the position of your countertops during transport, you need to know the exact support-bar and clamping-bar locations on your frame. Make a hand drawing of the frame with dimensions or on CAD, and use the drawing to determine piece locations based on length and order of installation.
Some kitchen layouts will work perfectly and others will be a give-and-take where pieces need to be out of the installation sequence in order to have the proper support and clamping bars. A frame with some of the pieces in order is still more-efficient than one that was just thrown together, so the effort will still pay for itself even if it doesn’t work 100-percent of the time.
When you have two separate kitchens going on the same trip, make an effort not to mix and match them on both sides of the frame. It may be easier from a loading perspective, but when you start moving pieces from one job to get to pieces from another, you’re creating a risk level for both projects.
If you have a worst-case scenario with breakage, you could be remaking pieces and awaiting payment on two jobs at the same time. Again, this will require more upfront effort and planning, but I think it’s well worth it to avoid risk.
If you have to mix-and-match jobs and move pieces around, make sure to clamp the pieces for the next project back down as soon as you can. Don’t wait until you are ready to leave. If the first job has had problems, you might be distracted and forget.
Hearing the crash of the second job falling off the frame isn’t going to make your day any better.
Think it’s too elementary to forget something as easy as clamping the pieces back down? Almost anyone who installs more than one project a day will have done it.
Believe me – I’ve done it. I was lucky and got away with a minor fixable scratch and learned my lesson. But a friend of mine lost most of a kitchen and the full-height backsplash for it, and almost his job as well.
How the pieces are put together on the frame is just as important as where they are put on the frame. Protecting finished countertop faces and edges from damage during transport is a key to installing a successful job.
The easiest way to do this is to load clean, grit-free countertops face-to-face, back-to-back. With face-to-face pieces, it’s still advisable to have a layer of protection in-between. My fabricators have, on occasion, used rosin paper, thin foam sheets, Mylar, and cardboard for this purpose.
I’m not a fan of cardboard because it can compress when tightly clamped and allow piece movement, so I wouldn’t recommend it. One of the fabricators I worked for almost lost an island from a metal A-frame on a trailer because the cardboard protecting the face compressed and the clamps fell off.
If you’re hauling marble or limestone that’s still wet from the fabrication process, stay away from colored rosin paper. The dye in the paper can stain the stone.
It’s possible to do away with protection in-between face-to-face pieces as long as they are clean and you protect finished faces from saw-cut edges. A saw-cut edge on a slightly warped piece of stone can rub a straight scratch into a finished face if the two pieces move independently of each other during transport.
I’ve seen this happen to a large Brazil Black conference table, and it wasn’t pretty. The scratch wasn’t noticeable until after the piece was in place, which meant a heavy carry-out followed the heavy carry-in. The entire face had to be resurfaced, followed by another install trip.
Tape off all saw cut edges that face finished pieces with a layer of blue or green painter’s tape. If you’re installing a scribed piece with no backsplash, this may include the bottom edge of face-to-face pieces. A straight scratch looks just as bad near the wall as it does across the entire surface.
A sure-fire way to ruin a piece is to load an unprotected face against the back of another piece and then haul it to a jobsite. Don’t assume everyone knows this, or is conscientious enough not to let it happen.
My father was picking up a pre-loaded frame for us that was arranged in just such a way. He made the fabricator’s guys unload the frame and inspect all the pieces for scratches before they reloaded it face-to-face, back-to-back with a protective layer.
If a countertop face is completely protected, it’s possible to load face-to-back, and one of my fabricators does it on a regular basis with no trouble. If you load this way, just remember the “completely protected” part.
Securing slightly warped stone with the clamp-down bars on a modern frame is always a little nerve-wracking. The design is so good that it’s possible to create a lot of torque and flatten pieces against each other with the clamp-down bars. Some stones have a little give and will react well to this, others will simply break.
When you snug the bars into place, go easy and do a little on each consecutive bar so you can see what’s happening along the way. When there’s enough pressure that you can’t shake the bars back and forth, stop. Warped stone is a headache enough, so there’s no sense in testing the limits.
As a final precaution, always make sure the surface facing the clamp-down bar is clean when your last piece has the polished face out. I’ve had a piece that was slightly dulled in the area where it met the bar. Fine stone dust will do that.
The modern transport frame is a great potential benefit for today’s installers, but only when they plan ahead and load one with care. Do that, and you will have more successful installs.
Jason Nottestad, a 13-year stone-industry veteran, is co-owner of Wisconsin-based Midwest Template Service.