From:
"dondougan@zzzzzzzz" <dondougan@zzzzzzzz>
Date:
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 08:44:58 GMT
Subject:
stone carving workshop
Hi Tom,
Quoted text begins.RE: Do you have any idea what the going rates are?
End of quote.
Not really, . . . Hugo may be the one to ask about that. The last time I got a quote was for a failed commission back in the mid-1990s, when Georgia Cherokee and Solar Gray were $75 a cubic foot and Georgia White Statuary grade and Etowah Pink were $125 a cubic foot.
Quoted text begins.RE: Have you had experience with G. marble? Is it true it holds up well outdoors?
End of quote.
Yes on both counts . . . I have a lot of Georgia marble in my stockpile.
Some of it was freshly quarried when I got it from Tate and Marble Hill quarries and the Architectural processing mill in Nelson, while a good deal of my Georgia marble was quarried back before the Great Depression when the local Marietta Georgia Marble cutting mill shut down and left tons lying on the ground. In the early 1980s the property was sold to a chemical company on adjoining property for expansion of their manufacturing facility, and while they filled, bulldozed and cleared the woods that had grown up around the marble blocks they allowed local sculptors to come in and haul away as much as we wanted. I figure I hauled about 8 or 9 tons to my studio in my little Toyota pick-up truck over about a two or three year period before they paved the property over completely. I got some other types of marble there too, notably Tennessee pink, Alabama white, and a little bit of Vermont and Italian marble. These other marbles held-up to the 60-plus years of weathering with
varying degrees of success, but none of them as well as the Georgia marble (Alabama white suffered the worst).
To tell you the honest truth, except for minor surface staining on the blocks that had lain on the ground, I cannot tell any difference in the carving qualities between the freshly quarried and the 60-plus year old exposed-to-the-elements Georgia marble. Georgia marble has a large crystalline grain structure with very little porosity, which makes it one of the best marbles to withstand weathering (though obviously as a calcium carbonate it is still affected by atmospheric acids). The large crystals - think 'rock-salt' instead of sugary dust - does limit the amount of fine detail that can be achieved in smaller than life-size carving.
Good Carving to You,
Don
Don Dougan
http://www.dondougan.homestead.com/indexdd.html
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