Splitting & Shaping Hard Stone by Hand

#stone #quarrying #wedge

Granite is hard but it behaves like glass and will easily crack. Not very flexible it crack long microcracks forced into it by wedges. In that way it is very obedient and predictable.

Prediction: "But they are using steel chisels and not copper/bronze ." This is a common response due to the LAHT narrative. Once agin Christopher Dunn is at the centre of this. Since he couldn't remove a granite core with a copper wedge, he severely deformed the tool and do he needed a steel wedge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL_Y7DpsDCQ&t=411s It is simple, in here I show people explaining and demonstrating the difference between annealed (soft) copper and hardened copper. I also show experiments of my own using copper shims and wooden wedges. Neither the copper nor the wedges are deformed, the only real damage is to the wooden wedges from lightly hammering on the top of them with a stone.

Link to a blacksmith who was asked to make copper wedges for a documentary on Egypt where they successfully used them to split stone. He tried to advise them to use a copper alloy instead of pure modern copper. It worked anyway but the ancient Egyptian and Peruvian copper was high in arsenic making it much harder and better for such tools. https://www.instructables.com/Blacksmithing-Ancient-Egyptian-Copper-Chisels/

Also https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRgDlOOu2R9hVo7v4epqC9A A channel full of fantastic demonstrations of stone splitting and working techniques since he does it for a living.

Other ways to split stones such as these is with wooden wedges that were then soaked in water causing them to expand. Also existing cracks could be filled with water and allowed to freeze overnight in cold climates causing the stone to split.

Video sources Stone splitting Wedge and feather for mining https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zu-4HhAySE Incredible moment a group of men breaks open a 30-ft tall rock using a hammer and a chisel in India https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlSVtHWx20 Rock splitting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbat10tGL9k ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEUQGxsAvgQ