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Stone carving is fun
Aug. 1st, 2022 08:20 am... but takes a certain level of energy. I have fallen into a work pattern of taking a break every 35 minutes or 1.5 hours. My work shift is 7 hours, and according to my logs I have been carving 4.5 to 5 hours a day, and doing 7 carving sessions.
Since I started carving the big bellows stone on Saturday I have been very careful to log my time, as I want to know how long it will take.
This is a very different project than originally planned for this summer job. I wanted to make cooking pots in different sizes and test them to see exactly how long water keeps boiling after the pot is removed from the fire, and how that number changes when the ratio between the mass of the pot and the mass of the water changes.
Then another blacksmith, Rod, from the UK arrived, with a goal to make a Viking style sword in our Viking style smithy. (Most folk making Viking style swords are using modern workshops, so their end result looks right, but will have differences measurable on the microscopic scale.)
Since the size of the bellows stone effects how large of a sweet spot (ideal temperature) one can obtain in a forge with hand pump bellows he wondered if I could make them a new, larger bellows stone? Yes, indeed, the block of soapstone the museum obtained for my work is plenty big enough for the suggested size, even after we had alredy removed two pot sized blocks.
He suggested that we use the Snaptun Stone as our inspiration, only ours would be bigger.
So Friday night after work we used power tools to rough cut the shape and then tried to split the thickness of the block because we wanted the stone to be about 2/3 of the thickness of the slab.
Soapstone, however, is not brittle (which is part of why we use it!!!), so it doesn't split easily. First we used the stone cuttig disk on the angle grinder to make a cut about 7 cm deep all the way around the block. Then we started hammering in lots of metal wedges. Eventually, instead of splitting the stone completly, the edge bit of stone that had been sliced with the grinder broke off, leaving the middle psrt untouched. Repeat for each edge, and look at the huge middle section which is still at full width. Darn. Get out the drill, drill holes in the part that sticks out. Pound in the wedges. Chunks break off, but the (now smaller) middle section remains stubbornly behind. By then we'd been working two hours (after a full day's work), and the new slope to the middle protrousion didn't look inviting to drill, so we called it good for the night and decided I could remove it with a chisel later.
Shower, yoga, sleep. Wake up to the news that the smithy had burned down in the night. Good thing we have already started a replacement bellows stone. (We don't know yet if the orginal stone surrived the collapse of that side of the hearth--the fire department hasn't had time to do their investigation of the site yet, so we can't yet go in to salvage the things that survived (the hammars and tools will need re-hardening, and new wooden hammers, but we can see from outside the police line tape that they are otherwise fine.)
So now I am focusing on making that new stone as quickly as I can using hand tools. As I chisel away that middle protrusion I am trying to get as big of chunks as I can so that we can have a station at the Viking Festival for kids to try to carve fishing line sinkers, or whatever else they want.
That part is hard work, so I start with that first, and then switch to rounding the edges and converting the angle cuts of my block to the graceful curves of the Snaptun Stone, becuse it is more fun.
My deadline is to have this ready by the day the rebuilt stone forge is built up to level it goes. However, we can't know yet when that will be, since we need the "all clear to begin the rebuild" from both the folk investigating the fire and the museum administration before we start. Not that it really matters. The stone cutting project will take how long it takes. I have seven (read five effective) hours a day, five days a week to give it right now With luck the timing will work out well.
Since I started carving the big bellows stone on Saturday I have been very careful to log my time, as I want to know how long it will take.
This is a very different project than originally planned for this summer job. I wanted to make cooking pots in different sizes and test them to see exactly how long water keeps boiling after the pot is removed from the fire, and how that number changes when the ratio between the mass of the pot and the mass of the water changes.
Then another blacksmith, Rod, from the UK arrived, with a goal to make a Viking style sword in our Viking style smithy. (Most folk making Viking style swords are using modern workshops, so their end result looks right, but will have differences measurable on the microscopic scale.)
Since the size of the bellows stone effects how large of a sweet spot (ideal temperature) one can obtain in a forge with hand pump bellows he wondered if I could make them a new, larger bellows stone? Yes, indeed, the block of soapstone the museum obtained for my work is plenty big enough for the suggested size, even after we had alredy removed two pot sized blocks.
He suggested that we use the Snaptun Stone as our inspiration, only ours would be bigger.
So Friday night after work we used power tools to rough cut the shape and then tried to split the thickness of the block because we wanted the stone to be about 2/3 of the thickness of the slab.
Soapstone, however, is not brittle (which is part of why we use it!!!), so it doesn't split easily. First we used the stone cuttig disk on the angle grinder to make a cut about 7 cm deep all the way around the block. Then we started hammering in lots of metal wedges. Eventually, instead of splitting the stone completly, the edge bit of stone that had been sliced with the grinder broke off, leaving the middle psrt untouched. Repeat for each edge, and look at the huge middle section which is still at full width. Darn. Get out the drill, drill holes in the part that sticks out. Pound in the wedges. Chunks break off, but the (now smaller) middle section remains stubbornly behind. By then we'd been working two hours (after a full day's work), and the new slope to the middle protrousion didn't look inviting to drill, so we called it good for the night and decided I could remove it with a chisel later.
Shower, yoga, sleep. Wake up to the news that the smithy had burned down in the night. Good thing we have already started a replacement bellows stone. (We don't know yet if the orginal stone surrived the collapse of that side of the hearth--the fire department hasn't had time to do their investigation of the site yet, so we can't yet go in to salvage the things that survived (the hammars and tools will need re-hardening, and new wooden hammers, but we can see from outside the police line tape that they are otherwise fine.)
So now I am focusing on making that new stone as quickly as I can using hand tools. As I chisel away that middle protrusion I am trying to get as big of chunks as I can so that we can have a station at the Viking Festival for kids to try to carve fishing line sinkers, or whatever else they want.
That part is hard work, so I start with that first, and then switch to rounding the edges and converting the angle cuts of my block to the graceful curves of the Snaptun Stone, becuse it is more fun.
My deadline is to have this ready by the day the rebuilt stone forge is built up to level it goes. However, we can't know yet when that will be, since we need the "all clear to begin the rebuild" from both the folk investigating the fire and the museum administration before we start. Not that it really matters. The stone cutting project will take how long it takes. I have seven (read five effective) hours a day, five days a week to give it right now With luck the timing will work out well.