Several years ago my wife and I installed saltillo clay (“Mexican”) tile on a new slab floor of an addition to our house and it looks great; however, a small crack has now developed in the slab and since the tile was firmly attached to the slab with thin set mortar, the overlying tile is cracking also. Is there some sort of a membrane that can be used to “float” the tiles so that they will be less susceptable to underlying slab cracks?
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GW, there are various crack isolation membranes available depending on the severity of the crack. Your local tile store (the one's that professional tile setters use, for example, "Daltile") will have membranes w/ a sticky back that adhere to a concrete floor for minor cracks. Look at a company called "The Noble Company" for crack isolation membranes for a variety of different situations, especially larger cracks (http://www.noblecompany.com).
I also have saltillo tile (and love it) that we installed ourselves over a 20 year old concrete slab. We put in crack isolation over only cracks we could see in the concrete. I wish I had done it everywhere since we have developed small cracks in a couple of places we left untreated. But we had a particularly difficult area where we added a room and had to span over the existing stemwall from the old concrete slab to the new one. We used a "Noble" membrane that worked like a charm.
Good luck.