listening, feelling

["daedelus lanthanien" <daedeluslanthanien@zzzzzzzzzzz>]

Hello everybody,
I've been mulling over the letters until I felt I could make my 2 cents into
a dollar.

The tapping discussion has been interesting. Personally I prefer to inspect
carving stones that are cut to dimension by a diamond saw, and unweathered
Eyeballing fractures is much easier, when I find them this way I know right
where they are and sometimes I can work it out. I sometimes tap stones and
built walls to feel for integrity though, my hearing stinks. I use light
taps and run my hand along the area that I'm concentrating on when I use
this method of detection. This test has been good to me but I have not yet
mastered the feel. I will know that I have a flaw, but the flaws
characteristics escape me to a certain degree. I use this test alot more
when I build walls, I try to avoid water spots. The solid stones feel like
one steady decrescendo vibration while the flawed ones feel uneven and
rumbly.

The limestone quarries in my local area exhibit color staining matching the
overburden. This color couples with basic suface oxidation and weathering of
the stone. Deeper within the parent bedrock alot of different colors appear
due to water bourne mineral deposits and ancient environmental conditions.
An odd occurance in our grey to white limestone is a layer approximately 1'
thick that exhibits a jet black color, it is strewn with fossils of
humongous trilobites and plant life. This layer also exhibits drusy
inclusions filled with calcite and marcusite making a rich contrast against
the black. I could go on forever and geology is chaos.

As far as the blocks sitting out in a yard now. Most stone will oxidize to
some degree, marble and limestone happen to oxidize pretty quickly. Our
wonderful love of industrialisation has also affected the chemistry of our
enviroment in a profound way making it worse on any fine sculpture left
outdoors, with the exception of granite, we have nuclear weapons for that.

daed