where to buy feathers and wedges

[don dougan <dondougan@zzzzzzzz>]

Dulce;

I agree with all the other folks as far as not being too keen on feathers
and wedges for alabaster.  Though I use feathers and wedges often for
marble, I have never used them on alabaster -- though I did have a
student who wished she hadn't . . . she ended up with her stone splitting
crossways to what she wanted.
She used the feathers and wedges correctly, but in her case the alabaster
veins were much weaker in that direction than the direction she wanted to
split it, so it split exactly opposite the way she wanted it to.   She
was left with two halves that each had several holes left in them, so in
addition to modifying her design for the unexpected shape of the stone,
she also had to deal with either filling or incorporating the holes into
the design.

If you are going to try to do it with a hand saw, go to a pawn shop and
get an old saw.  The teeth should feel fairly sharp and the blade needs
to be flat - not curved or bent.  That will be the least expensive way to
get your boulder in two, and build up some muscles too!

However, here is a suggestion of a method that might be a little less
tedious than sawing with a hand saw, and relatively inexpensive if you
already own a portable 7-1/4" circular saw.  Though a masonry abrasive
blade on the circular saw won't cut the boulder deep enough (even cutting
in from all sides) to go all the way through your boulder, you can use
some wooden shims to split it the rest of the way.  Shims are available
 from Home Depot or other building supply outlets for fitting door
jambs/window frames into rough woodframe construction.
Note: metal shims would be better, but they usually have to be homemade
 from old leaf springs with lots of grinding!

Anyway, after you have cut all the way around the boulder with the
abrasive blade as deeply as possible -- 2 to 21/2 inches maybe -- then
see if you can slide some thin pieces of sheet-metal into the saw kerf
two-by-two in pairs all the way around the boulder.  Then, tap the wooden
shims in between each pair of pieces of sheet metal, one blow per shim at
a time, until they are all tight.  This will work better than drilled
holes for the alabaster because the saw kerf weakens the stone in the
direction you want better than separate drill holes.  The wooden shims
should not bottom-out in the saw kerf (if they do get close to
bottoming-out, pull them out of the kerf, and trim a little length off
the thin end of the wedge, and tap it back in), and the sheet metal
should be thick and stiff enough to keep the edges of the saw kerf from
crumbling as the shim wedges-in tight (maybe as thick as two layers of a
tinned vegetable can).

This is a variation on the way the Romans quarried marble blocks, only
their wedges were considerably larger, and after they pounded them in
tightly into the chiseled trough (a bigger version of your kerf) they
repeatedly soaked the dry wooden wedges with water over the course of a
day or more.  As the wood fibers swelled with the water, eventually the
stone would split.

Good Carving (Splitting!) to you
Don
http://www.dondougan.homestead.com/indexdd.html