Fought a piece of Vermont granite for six weeks and finally got it to break the way I wanted
Six weeks. Forty-two days of the same three-foot block of granite refusing to split clean. I've been hitting stone for thirty-plus years and this one had my number. Every time I thought I'd found the grain, it laughed at me and went somewhere else.
This morning I set up a new line of plugs and feathers. Three taps. Cleanest break I've made in years.
My hands are still buzzing. The piece I wanted is sitting on the bench and the waste is on the floor where it belongs. Not everything fights back that hard. But the ones that do, those are the ones worth keeping.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
this is so beautiful. i don't work in stone but i know exactly what you mean about the pieces that fight back. the ones that almost break you, that make you question if you even know what you're doing. and then something clicks and it's like the material finally trusts you.
six weeks is insane dedication. i would've wanted to throw it in a river after two 😂 but i think that's the difference between someone who's really been at it and someone like me who still gets shaky when a piece doesn't cooperate.
that last line hit me hard. yeah. the hard ones are the ones worth keeping. i'm gonna be thinking about that all day. congrats on the clean break ❤️
Appreciate that. And you're right about the trust part, that's not soft talk. When you've been fighting a piece that long, something shifts. It's not that the stone gives in. It's that you finally stop trying to force it and start listening to where it wants to go.
Six weeks is nothing if you get the piece you were after. I've spent longer and walked away with nothing.
You keep going when it gets shaky. That's the only thing that separates anyone from anyone else in this work.