Cutting Stone At The Deer Isle Hostel

here we are at the Deer Isle hostel and beautiful Down East Maine with a piece of Deer Isle granite 26,000 pounds worth of it we're gonna split it in two with a two pound hammer we have building buildings in here like it's the 19th century and around here they built the foundations with granite and where you find one that still usually looks just like when they put it there Freddie well there's the three parts of feathers and wedges he's going around hole as you go down it's bigger but it goes very slowly as you cap it increases the pressure so this is the first big block I'm gonna split by myself this one's for a woodshop it will look like an old New England barn as you drive the wedges the small crack forms between them and if you listen close you can hear the crack cheering down through the stone and you want to do that slowly because different tracks are forming through the crystals and you want them to go slow because they'll be attracted to each other given the time so that a split like this you want to take about an hour a lot of movement this time right now I'll put it into two pieces of equal mass which is often the rule of splitting it into equal mass oh right think of this she's cranked all the way down here water's coming right out of the crack coming down here well that's about all I see but we're almost through the stone you see and it's coming right square just the way we want it that sounded hollow that's good oh boy now you can hear it crack kind of groans and pops just a little bit opening up now now you can really see that crack opening up so once we've cut this it will open up we'll have to clean up faces and then we'll split off those cleaner faces this rock contains about a hundred and fifty cubic feet of granite we're gonna split it down into 20 block of about equal size measuring 8 inches by 16 inches by 5 feet those blocks will contain 5 cubic feet of granite at a hundred and sixty pounds of cubic foot so they'll weigh 800 pounds apiece we'll have 20 of them and then we'll have 50 cubic feet left over to do something else fact rate to this sale loose that's cutting the stone has completely given way at this point well it's two pieces of rock now what do we do

Channel: Joe Dorr

Views: 7,547,454

Rating: 4.6027298 out of 5

Keywords: granite, Deer Isle Hostel, cutting stone, cutting stone by hand, cutting natural stone, feathers and wedges, cutting rock, splitting granite, Maine

Id: cBMcMGBhUVk

Length: 6min 48sec (408 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 24 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/MostValuable]

ha ha, I love the "well it's two pieces of rock, now what do we do?" at the end

[u/FranticDisembowel]

I am stupid. I thought it would just split in two and fall over, like a mighty stone tree being felled. Why am I an idiot?

[u/[deleted]]

Not sure if I missed something he said, but how do you get those holes in it in the first place?

[u/barbaric_yaup]

the musical sounds that the pins make are oddly satisfying

[u/MelodicFacade]

I love the change in pitch in each stake

[u/hyabtb]

How to split a 26,000 pound block of granite in two using a 2 pound hammer (and a diamond tipped tungsten steel drillbit)

[u/TheOriginalMyth]

What a anticlimactic end, I kind of loved it.

[u/Beardgardens]

Just curious, but near the end of the video, he uses his crow bar to jostle the two giant ~13,000lb rocks. That blows my mind. Wouldn't think that's possible.

edit: word

[u/j1ggy]

That was actually interesting. Thanks OP.