BLINDING VINYL! OFF TO THE AMTICO FACTORY!

On Friday 22, I went to visit the training centre and factory of luxury vinyl flooring manufacturer Amtico, to learn about their vast range of products, see how a vinyl tile is made, hear about their waste reduction and recylcing programs and understand the myriad of benefits from training and professional development courses at Amtico. Here are some snapshots I was allowed to take as we were guided around the factory - not featured: rather intense smells, squishy earplugs and super-funky factory health and safety shoes, which look rather like orthopaedic aids for club foot sufferers!

Amtico training centre - Note the "cool wall" at the back, where students proudly display work that they've done, ranging from "not so good" to "excellent" in order to compare and contrast, learn from their mistakes and show off the things they've learnt!



Here's where students get to discover and try out a range of grouts, adhesives, DPMs etc. from the four major brands: Ardex UK, Uzin, Mapei and F.Ball. Amtico are not biased and do not promote one over the other, rather they allow students to experiment and choose which they prefer and explore the properties and benefits of each one.


Trainer Neil Perriman talks me through the training process, explaining how students of different levels are given a vaariety of tasks as they progress through the course to ensure each student gets personalised training, feels challenged and is given plenty of opportunity to put into practice a range of skills.

AND ON TO THE FACTORY...


The funky entrance demonstrates the host of options that vinyl flooring offers. And that's not to mention the Amtico clients who've requested everything from a giant monopoly board created on the floor of their conservatory to the eccentric millionaire who had the basement of his gothic country house turned into a life sized Cluedo board!


First off, alchemy is performed... plasticizers are added to oil in giant vats and shuttled off to a scary looking machine called the Banbury Mixer, where it is mixed and heated until it becomes a squishy lump of plastic. This is then sent through a series of heated rollers to smooth it out into a continuous flat sheet.


WHOOSH! BLEEP! WHIRR!


Yes, those would be the big heated rollers... like an industrial-sized set of hair-straighteners. Except you wouldn't want to get your face stuck in them...


Here you can see clearly the different layers that make up the vinyl tile: the backing ply (black), the face ply (white) which sits on the backing ply, and the protective layers (Amtico tiles have 2 such layers!). The actual design of the tile, anything from wood to grass to stone to metallics, will depend on the printed film, which is made by a printers in Japan. This ultra-thin film is bonded onto the face ply, then coated with the protective layer and embossed with a grainy pattern to mimic real-life materials and textures.



Could it be magic? Nope... just lots of heat, heat, heat! Here the various layers are fed into another set of heated rollers, which bonds the layers together, changing the chemical properties within each to ensure strength and resilience and a solid bond. Note the brown roll coming up from the bottom is the very fine, thin film sheet which contains the design - in today's case an oak wood effect.


Finally the vinyl sheet is cut first into tiles, then the tiles arrive in this cutting room, which contains 30 cutting machines. here the tiles are cut to order to the client's specifications, stringent quality control checks are performed and tiles that pass the controls are boxed and dispatched! This is the end of the line for us journalists, but only the beginning of the life of a vinly floor tile!