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Quoted text begins.Why do you call him German Deceiver?? his work looks
pretty impressive to me.
If I could play devil's advocate for a minute, things
have been kind of tame around here of late. Do
real men work in alabaster?
End of quote.

Tom, you are bad news. I was hoping that international
slurr would go unheeding. I didn't really mean it is
such. I just meant that his game is that of the magican.
He is pulling the spiral out of the block.

Now about this alabaster. My wife's a real man and she
works in it! She had me making candle holders this
holiday season and man I got into it. We had some
raspberry that I sliced into odd blocks 4 or 5 inches by
less or same twice. Got some very odd duck sizes. I
drilled and epoxied a nut in the bottoms which I flattened
and recessed so we could put them on a rod through a
tapered 4x4 that could put in a tie vice that I often use
for smaller things. A tie vice being two 4x6 ties tied
together by two pipe clamps, a big clamp to hold the
bottom of the tapered four by four with the rod in it on
top of which the alabaster is threaded. Angela was happy
with that arrangement and happily ground away with her
larger translucent pieces. In no time at all I had mine,
eight or so, off their rods so I could shape them with a
granite hand set! Then I got out the nine point bush.
Wonderful crushed pink husk, almost like a natural basalt
rind is easily created in seconds. Combine that with the
spalt faces of deepest raspberry and you get some
interesting hard stone effects. I also carved happily
with the 5/16 shaft machine point in the Bantam hammer,
not pushing out chips at a fourty five degree angle but
bouncing at a dead on ninety degrees. I achieved very
nice sinewing and mounding, runnelling striations all with
great white drawing of where the point had been most busy,
almost like the whiting of dark granite. I could then
easily modulate the amount of white with several swipes of
600 or thousand grit. Endless challenges possible. I
would carve alabaster anyday, though as you know I am
quite unreal!

Bill