From:
B B <blb@zzzzzzzzzzzzzz>
Date:
Sat, 7 Jun 2003 18:41:57 -0700
Subject:
smoothing marble
On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 05:52 PM, justin rego wrote:
Quoted text begins.How do I
smooth marble in general and especially the hard nooks and cranny's?
should I go out and buy more diamond tools, i.e. diamond coated
rifflers etc...? Are these necessary for working with marble?
End of quote.
Justin,
couple of ideas for you:
there is two kinds of hardness. Mineral hardness and what is sometimes
called toughness. Also, some stone is more abrasive than others. Marble
mineral hardness is not very hard. It is softer than steel. However,
there's always other minerals in the matrix and they can wear out your
tools exceptionally fast, especially if it is silica or quartz.
Matrix toughness is determined by a bunch of factors. Consider sea
shells. They are made out of calcium based minerals just like marble,
but because of the structural nature of matrix, it is very tough, but
still softer than steel. Other factors that make stone tough is
porosity, size of the crystals, how they interlock and so forth. Now,
how you sort out all of this for a particular stone is a problem that
for the most part just requires experience or experimentation. So often
the best thing is to find others that know about the particular kind of
stone you are dealing with.
The second idea is that you will find as you get skilled, how you use
your tools makes a big difference in how efficient they work and how
long they hold their edge. An obvious example is directionality of
files and riffles. If you scrub or saw back and forth with them, the
back stroke is going the wrong direction and does not do the tool any
good. I am working some pretty hard marble right now, and I find that
all kinds of files and scrappers seem to work if they are sharp and I
experiment how to use them. The other day someone showed me a scrapper
that they made at the tip of a round file and how they leverage it
against a stick of wood to scrape deep into crevices. With alabaster a
person gets used to removing a lot of material just by abrasion. But
with marble, the matrix is so hard, that you have to start using the
technique of parallel troughs and then chipping off the resulting fins
or ridges.
The other fellow's comment was correct in the long run. It takes a lot
of time and effort to figure out the best tool and technique for the
situation and then to manually use it. But the problem solving is a fun
part for me, just as long as I remind myself I am not in an assembly
line production mode and when its over, the artifact will be around for
a few thousand years.
hope this helps,
Bill
- References
- message 00000: smoothing marble - justin rego (07 Jun 2003)
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