At 01:16 PM 11/30/96 EST, Bob Terwilliger wrote: >To Roderick Wall and All,
>I noticed that some of the responses Roderick posted were apparently sent to >him personally and not also posted to the mailing list. Yes, I did this inadvertently. Here is my experience (I think I sent this after Roderick had posted his summary) in more detail than I originally sent: Finding that granite is impractical without sandblasting equipment, I turned to slate. Slate is a soft stone which can be easily carved. I bought a piece of polished slate about 16 inches on each side from a local stonemason place. (I appreciate the fact that everybody won't have a stonemason place up the street as I do) One could possibly use the natural cleft slate (which is very cheap) sold for garden walks, but a sawn and polished piece, like what was traditionally used for blackboards, gives very nice results. I started by printing out roman numerals using my computer printer on a piece of heavy card stock. I cut them out with a razor blade to make stencils and used these stencils to transfer them onto the slate with white ink. Similarly, I printed hour lines on a piece of paper which I taped to the slate but transferred these by marking extensions; then removing the paper and reconnecting the lines. I then turned the inked lines into engraved lines by scratching in multiple several passes using a metal tool and a straight edge. The straight lines were very simple to do by making several passes and progressively cutting a V-shaped groove. The roman numerals were a little trickier. I used a straightedge for the straight parts and did some free-hand digging for the serifs. I started out trying to use a sculptor's pointed chisel I got at an art supply place with a light hammer but found this tended to chip, and I had more success with a little tool I had that is normally used to score plastic laminate for cutting. The tool is simply a plastic handle attached to a flat hardened steel shaft with a sort of shark-tooth shaped protjection at its tip. One could probably make something as good or better with a grinding wheel and a thin file. If you make a mistake or a slip of the hand (as I did a few times) and you haven't carved too deeply, the mistake can be sanded out using fine wet-or-dry sandpaper. The brass gnomon was another story. Jack Aubert E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.cpcug.org/user/jaubert
