As part of my terms and conditions still outstanding, I need to mark off with some sort of permanent markers the maximum edges of “lawn” which is essentially where the siltation barriers were. This is totally fine as it is swamp cabbage land on the other side!
My Dad and I enlisted our friend Jic Davis to help as he has a lot of experience with stone and stone work. My thought was to make some stone posts out of granite in the same way the Colonials did it – keep true to the site!
As it turns out, he was very gracious and not only showed me how to work the stone, but he let me use his tools AND gave to me some granite. Thank you Jic!
Two weeks ago, we went over to his house and picked the top two stones off his stone pile and used his loader/forklift to move them onto his gravel driveway out of the sun (it was VERY hot and humid). Then using his electric hammer drill, I drilled 1/2 inch holes around 8 inches apart and placed ‘pins & feathers’ in the holes. Pins and Feathers are the traditional way to split stone – essentially you have a spike (the pin) and place it in the hole. On each side, you place iron/steel strips- the idea is that as you drive down the spike, they slide along the strips and there is a spreading pressure you exert on the stone – since stone resists compression very well, but not tension/expansion, it is possible to split the stone. You need to have a feel for the grain of the stone and as Jic pointed out, the rock was being VERY cooperative that day.
we used, without much success, the exact same method to attempt to break up the boulder 13 years ago back in 2005. Shown here in this link http://www.sixthelement.org/images/carlisle/index.html
Things worked out great, I was able to split the rocks into exactly the size and shape needed to mark the boundaries. It was super fun. Thank you Jic!!!
I have photos below AND also Jic took some movies of the drilling (with Slo-Mo) and tapping away at the rock
