The Trouble With Templates
The submission-drawing process is probably well-known to most of you in the trade. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, the workflow is pretty simple.
An independent templater/installer like me uses one of the digital template systems to measure a countertop job. After getting the data, the kitchen is drawn in one of the computer-drafting systems, and the drawing goes to a fabricator, who cuts and polishes the job using saws, CNCs, and waterjets.
The finished job is then delivered to, or picked up by, the installer of the countertops and backsplash, who makes – for the lion’s share of jobs – only minor adjustments in the field.
The submission-drawing process has been tried and tested for years. Next month marks five full years of my own successful experience with digital templating and computer drawing.
While I had a few bumps in the road (and some harshly rejected drawings from a quartz company now widely despised in the stone industry for its continuing radon propaganda), once I had the system down, it was a piece of cake.
With one exception: digital templates for undermount sinks.
Undermount-sink templates continue to be the Achilles heel of the entire submission-drawing process. Sink manufacturers, both domestic and international, have yet to address the problem despite continual requests and protests from everyone in the countertop industry who has to undermount sinks on a regular basis.
The solution is so easy – a digital template that is a closed polyline with no splines and a side-view picture that shows the reveal the cutout will produce. Anyone in the sink industry that is reading this could make a lot of friends – and sell a lot more sinks – by following my advice. Let me repeat: closed polyline, no splines, clearly defined reveal.
The reality of undermount sink templates is far from the ideal I just laid out. The absolute explosion of sink models and manufacturers provides the consumer with a great variety of choices. Niche sink companies, European and Asian conglomerates, and some knock-off manufacturers all rushed in to get a piece of the U.S. housing boom.
For the granite guy, this means having to locate or create, verify, and program a massive number of sink templates. One large fabricator I know has more than 800 digital templates on file. There are probably others with more than that.
For those of you who have yet to experience the joy of searching for a digital template online, let me clue you in on what some of your encounters might be like.
You find the sink manufacturer’s Website, which turns out to be a waste of time. They have some nice line drawings of the sink in the PDF format, or maybe a DWG with drawings of the sink.
But what they haven’t posted is the digital file they used to create the cutout on the paper or cardboard template. It’s clear they drew that paper template with CAD; they just didn’t get around to posting it where it could be of use to anyone in the countertop industry.
Or, your customer Mrs. Jones is trying to save a few bucks on a sink, so she goes online (eBay, perhaps) and buys a banjo-shaped stainless-steel kitchen sink from somewhere beyond the seas. The sink hasn’t arrived (imagine that!) by the time you template the job, so you try to be a nice guy and ask her for the manufacturer and model number so you can look online for a template.