Thread by @James_Taite

The art of persuasion with a 3-pound hammer, or stonecutting…

a thread:

As a building material, stone is timid, unambitious. It is modest, plodding, and incremental, one chunk laid atop another. Another, and another. In nature we often find it rolled dull by streams and tides, or buried, in beds belowground. It’s a burrowing animal, a groundhog.

Compare it to trees and birds, springing irrepressibly, reaching. Stone has to be pushed, persuaded. Bullied. Raised, under protest, against the pressure of gravity. It has to be coaxed to those feats of structural daring that come so easily to timber or steel.

Corbels inch cautiously out into space from their place of safety and support. Lintels, even short ones, will seek shelter under relieving arches.

Every mason needs a thorough appreciation of the nature of stone, a casual intimacy with its qualities, but when it comes to working stone there’s no wisdom in ‘listening to the material’. Stone tells us only that it wants to be left alone. Preferably somewhere cool and chthonic.

“…The old granite stones, those are my people;
Hard heads and stiff wits but faithful, not fools, not chatterers;
And the place where they stand today they will stand also to-morrow.”

Robinson Jeffers, ‘The Old Stone-mason’

Hard heads and stiff wits. Which is precisely why the accomplishments of masonry are so astounding. Why the invention of the arch and the vault and the dome, enclosing large spaces with small stones by sorcery or geometry, was such an incredible leap of the human imagination.

That’s why the glorious concatenation of flying buttresses and crocketed pinnacles and hallelujah traceries of the Gothic idiom are so unbelievable: not because they do astounding things, but do them against the natural inclination of the material. They do what trees do.

Stone is cautious because stone wasn’t born yesterday. It shares none of our naïve delusions about heroically defying time: stone knows that stone will fall, stone will break.

And a stonecutters job is to tell it where to break. To break it pre-emptively and methodically.

Here are ‘plug and feathers’. An old way of splitting stone with an unlikely name. Maybe it refers to the persuasive tickle of this technique.

Holes are drilled in line. 2 feathers (half-rounds of steel, tapered from a thicker bottom) are inserted with a wedged plug between.

The line of plugs are struck in sequence, over and over. As they are gradually driven home the plugs exert pressure on the stone to the full depth of the feathers. Patience is rewarded; pausing between hammer-blows gives the stone time to listen to the tool, time to respond.

You acquire an ear for the work; the rising tension in the stone is revealed by the sound of the hammer on the plugs. When it lets go, when that tone changes from hi high higher to lo, you feel it in your gut. A Friday-afternoon-pint kind of sound. Tink, tiink, tiinkk, dhunnghk.

A common way to cut rubble to length or height is to score the stone with a chisel called a tracer, all the way around. To ‘trace’ the line upon which you want it to break. That word implies a light touch, a mere suggestion.

That word is a lie. It’s an imperative.

But even when using a lighter touch, when cutting finer work, the banker mason will set out the finished form with scribe lines scored into the surface of the block. These serve as guides, of course. References. A blind rest for the blade of a chisel.

But they are also instructions to the stone in language it understands.

With luck, unintended fractures or spalls are directed by the scribe to this intended place. That hint of an incision is sometimes enough to let the stone know where to break.

“To carve stone is simply to chip away the unnecessary stuff until you reach the form inside.” A rather romantic bit of bunk sometimes attributed to Michelangelo, sometimes to John Ruskin, though there’s no evidence that either said anything like it.

And the reality of cutting stone is generally less poetic. It’s often just a matter of communicating expectations, of scribing boundaries, of making it clear where you want the stone to fail; a matter of persuading hard heads and stiff wits to yield, and yield on the line.

(All photos mine.)