I have cast, coated and dried a batch of brick panels, but don't know how to use them. Originally I was just going to use these panels as backs for other pieces so that the frames I was making looked finished on both sides. Now that I have these pieces done I feel they may be a waste to use them on the back of other pieces that I have not yet made. The end result is a set of brick panels made from a variety of cements with depths ranging from 3/8" to 1/2". The brick patterns go in a vertical direction on half the panels and horizontal on the other half. The panels are 13" wide by 16" tall and are basically large flat cement tiles. I have coated the cement with two layers of polyester resin with atomized steel mixed in to help resist weathering.
The resin top coat would allow me to paint or bond other paint or coatings to the top and this seems to be the direction I am going with finishing the pieces. I have a couple of sets of stencils with mugshots and my thought is to coat an area with a light background color with spray paint or polyester resin and atomized aluminum to create a grey tone, then spray paint the stencil on top of the grey area. The problem with this is that I am wasting all the black area that I spent so much time finishing. The ease of painting the panels before mounting them should solve some of the problems associated with working on the panels when they are already made in the frames. I just feel it is a shame to cover them with a bunch of paint after doing all the work to make them black.
The frames themselves are not super strong and can crack if they were stepped or if they were dropped from a few feet off the ground. I do think they could be used as small table tops for outside use if I go back and mount them in the wooden screen printing frames. The reason for making these outside the frames is that all of the casting materials that I used, cement, gypsum plasters and hybrid plasters with acrylic and fibers mixed in. Still there is always a loosening of the material from the frame when I don't reinforce the pieces and anchor them to the frame while making them. I started using this as a technique with the cements and mortars since they shrink even more than the plasters and I have been using the frames as molds with the entire panel popping out after a couple of days.
I am hopeful that the cements are more resistant to weathering than the plasters, but still I went ahead and coated the cement panels with the polyester resin coating to see how that worked. I was hopeful that the coatings would provide a gel coat like strength to the fragile cement panels.
This may have worked but I can't really test the strength without placing a load on the panels. I placed an unfinished panel on the ground a stood on it and it cracked right away. The surface wasn't exactly smooth and I weight about 200 lbs, so it wasn't a fair fight. I do think these panels can hold 10 to 30 pounds no problem and if they were set in with a backing material then I don't see why they couldn't hold a larger load. Again, I don't have a reason for making them this strong, but I keep wanting to make these panels into something useful and if they can carry a decent load then they may be useful as a flooring or table top. As a wall or side panel or decoration they don't need the additional strength. If I put a lattice or thin rebar in the material when I cast it then I can increase the strength of the panels significantly, or at least when they crack the pieces would not separate as easily from each other.
I know that tile is not reinforced with a lattice and by setting it on top of strong materials that do not bend and filling the areas around the tiles with grout creates a water resistant base without have a reinforced tile itself. Any tile by itself would crack and break with even the slightest drop or hit with a hammer, yet tiles work great once they are installed, so I do not think it will be necessary to put a rebar lattice structure into the brick panels as long as I provide the proper backing and mounting surface and fill any voids so there is not movement below the pieces. Since tile is such a good material I can't help but wonder why people don't also use tiles on the outside of their houses? Wow, I did a search on this topic and of course there is much more to it than I imagined, but exterior tiles are a huge business, although it seems stone finishes like marble and rock are the most practical and elegant application for exterior tiles. Bonding is going to be important so my next step may be to create a mechanical and a chemical bonding method for attaching my brick tiles to an exterior wall so that I can sit around and watch them weather.
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