Diamond blades are required for the harder stones like granite, but can also be used on the softer stones. A flush mount adapter increases the versatility of the tool, but will have to be used without the safety guard.
You must cut in a perfectly straight line with these blades. Any torque could cause the blade to bind and kick back or damage the blade. An effective way to remove stone quickly is to make a series of parallel cuts about an inch apart, then break them off with a hammer and chisel. The diamond cup wheel is very effective at smoothing rough surfaces on granite before polishing. A die grinder can be useful when carving softer stones like soapstone and alabaster.
Equipped with diamond-coated burs, it can make the job of carving small details or getting into holes and crevices much easier. The impact 'hammer' action of a hammer drill is necessary when drilling stone.
A regular drill will just spin and not cut into the stone. Carbide-tipped masonry drill bits must be used. Caution must be taken when drilling a hole completely through the stone. As you near the other side, the impact of the drill will blow out the stone surrounding the exit hole. The impact of a larger hammer drill may be required for drilling into harder stones like granite. It uses carbide tipped drill bits.
For larger holes, a pneumatic rock drill and carbide-tipped drill bits with air running down the center of the bit to the tip to blow out the dust are used. For polishing large, fairly flat surfaces on harder stones, I use a pneumatic, center water feed polisher. The polisher has a Velcro head that accepts pads containing diamonds of different grits held in a hard resin, from 40 grit coarse to grit very fine.
The water helps wash away the dust particles removed by the diamonds. Granite City Tool Co. PO Box 11 Blackwell St.
Sculpture House, Inc. Skillman, NJ www. Toggle navigation Menu The Sculpture Studio. Hand Tools. Safety Equipment The most important safety rule is to always wear safety glasses. Chisels The point chisel or punch is the workhorse of the chisels.
Hammers Hammers come in a variety of weights for doing different jobs. Handset The handset or pitching tool is used for knocking large chunks of stone off the edge of a square block. Rasps and Rifflers The final shaping of the softer stones can be done with rasps. Pneumatic Stone Carving Tools. Chisels The chisels used with pneumatic hammers are basically the same as the hand tools.
Pneumatic Hammers These pneumatic hammers from Trow and Holden work on an internal piston driven by compressed air. Bushing Tools There are also specialty tools such as bushing chisels, frosting chisels, cup chisel, and criss-cross chisel. Compressor Each size hammer requires a particular amount of air consumption to work properly.
Banker The banker, or work bench, should be strong enough to hold the weight of the stone and be stable enough to take the abuse of the pushing and pounding of stone carving. When carved by hand there is an incredible amount of strength, patience and craftsmanship involved. In a more industrial context, the machines are simply mesmerizing to watch.
Before the development of metal carving tools, harder stones were used to shape soft stones like chalk or soapstone. Traditionally stonecarving was used to make facades for cathedrals, statues and religious iconography.
During the 20th century however artists working in stone such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and began to make more abstract shapes - a practice which has continued to this day. Letter cutting is similar to hand carving, but uses the chisel at different angles to make letterforms. It is typically used to make gravestones, plaques or lettering on monuments. Much like a sign painter, training in the art of letter cutting means developing a solid understanding of typography.
Lettering is often adapted to the type of stone; considering layout and purpose when deciding on the shapes, spacing, colours, shadows and type of cuts to be used. You can read more about the work of a letter cutter here. Sand Blasting is the process of forcing sand through an air compressed pressure nozzle to shape another surface.
Sandblasting can also be done with other abrasives, such as glass, plastic or for a lighter finish, baking soda. In stone, sandblasting is typically used to create lettering or other images on gravestones. Many stone masons will make a rubber stencil, which is then placed on the stone to protect the areas they do not want blasted away.
These stencil images are often made digitally before being cut out using a vinyl cutter -which means that any digital font or flat image can be translated onto stone.
There is still a divide between stonemasons and letter cutters as to the quality of techniques like sand blasting. On the one hand it is cheaper and faster, but tends to use typography intended for paper and ink, rather than the material qualities of stone reducing its effectiveness. Diamond allows tools such as saws, drills and grinders to cut through particularly hard surfaces, such as stone. An industrial circular diamond saw for example, has diamond tips embedded all around the edge.
Once a rough figure emerges, more precise markings are made with charcoal, pencil or crayon on the stone, and the sculptor then uses basic hammer and point work technique to create more definition.
Other specific tools like a toothed chisel, claw chisel, rasps and rifflers are used to create the final figure. During the Renaissance period these the main tools for a sculptors would include: a set of chisels Gli Scalpelli including flat Scalpello , pointed Subbia , round-ended Unghietto , toothed Gradina , and splitting Scapezzatore chisels; a mallet La Mazza used to strike the chisel. As well as this, the sculptor would use several different hammers - to strike the edge-tools like the chisels and also the stone itself.
In addition to these traditional tools, 20th-century sculptors had access to pneumatic hammers, as well as other power tools like a diamond-bladed angle-grinder, and numerous hand drills. Today, in keeping with the principles of postmodernist art , stone carvers may use even more sophisticated equipment, such as oxy-acetylene torches, lasers and jet heat torches. Famous Stone Sculptures. Celebrated stone statues and reliefs can be seen in some of the best art museums and sculpture gardens around the globe.
Masterpieces include:. By Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. By Andre Derain. By Constantin Brancusi. By Wilhelm Lehmbruck. By Modigliani. By Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. By Jacques Lipchitz. Paul Landowski. By Henry Moore. By Gertrude Whitney. By Jacob Epstein. By Gutzon Borglum. All rights reserved. Stone Sculpture c. Introduction If petroglyphs including the extraordinary cultural phenomena known as cupules constitute the world's oldest art , stone sculpture is the oldest mobiliary portable art.
History Prehistoric Stone Sculpture Leaving aside the earlier but more controversial effigies, and the flat engravings seen in Paleolithic rock art , the first prehistoric sculpture in stone was the series of Venus figurines which began appearing across Europe from about 30, BCE. Ancient Stone Sculpture Egyptian sculpture also made full use of stone in both statues and reliefs - see, for instance, the sandstone Statue of Akhenaten c.
Romanesque Stone Sculpture The zenith of stone carving occurred during the period , when Rome and its monastic orders instituted their massive program of church building, based on a new style of church architecture, known as Romanesque.
Gothic Stone Sculpture After the Romanesque era came the golden age of stone work, in the form of Gothic architecture , exemplified by the great French Cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, Amiens, and Reims, with their soarching vaults, huge stained glass windows, perched gargoyles, Biblical relief sculpture and ranks of column statues.
Moai Sculptures from Easter Island The Polynesian territory of Easter Island is home to a particularly striking and unusually durable type of Oceanic art - the famous Moai or mo'ai. Sculpting Methods and Materials Types of Stone Stone comes in many different varieties, giving artists plenty of choice in respect of colour, quality and hardness. Stone Carving Techniques The carving begins with the chiseling away of large chunks of redundant rock a process known as "roughing out", "pitching", or "knocking off" , using a point chisel and a wedge-shaped pitching chisel, together with a masons driving hammer.
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