Assorted granite

[dfidler]

All,

I heard about a guy in the UK (Birmingham) who is trying to get rid of a bunch of granite off cuts and is likely to dump them pretty cheaply. I'm going to his place tomorrow (sunday) to see what he's got and take an informal inventory.

I'm told that he's looking to get rid of ~3 tons of it (preferably to a single buyer rather than piece meal).

I don't need 3 tons of stone. I only need four pieces; one 24"x28" and two 16"x19" and one scrap to practice my stone cutting/polishing skills on (aka ruin) in black.

But I thought that if others are interested in this, we could put together something of a group buy (well, kind of) to take [some of] this stuff off his hands.

Sorry for the short notice, but is there any interest out there? I'm in Watford so if you're closer to London, I could probably hire a van to drive it down to my place, but you'd need to pick it up from here. I'd just be looking to cover any costs associated with driving it down.

Note: I have no idea what sizes/colours he's got as I'm just exploring right now. But at the prices that I *think* he's selling this at, I suspect it's likely going to go quickly.

Cheers,
Dave.

[dfidler]

... Or if it turns out to be a great deal and someone local has a van (so I don't have to hire one), I'd be willing to cover transport costs down to the London area too.

[Rodeodave]

How much would shipping to Austria be? I could use one or two slabs...

[dfidler]

I'm not sure but I'll be happy to find out. My first guess would be about £50,000 + 20%VAT, but that's just a guess. Happily though, the granite itself would be pretty cheap.

[ArtG]

I think that when you go to look at it, you may find that only 3 tons of granite is a far smaller amount than you are picturing! My recent ancestors made a living of the coast of Maine, by loading boats with ice, cut from lakes and rivers (before refrigeration), in the summer, and granite the rest of the year. I imagine they were in top physical shape!

[simon7000]

2.7 gm/cc! 3,000,000/2.7 = 1,111,111 cc = 1.1 cu M! It would fit in my car, of course my car wouldn't be able to move because the springs couldn't hold the weight. But you could move it with a trailer!

[wbeaty]

I'm curious about granite acoustics. Wouldn't a granite block have a huge resonance spike? Act like a bell, or like a slab of glass?

Or do certain types of granite have acoustic damping (more like a lead bell than a bronze bell)?

(Also I've always wanted to try the N. Tesla trick: pump a few hundred watts into a granite slab and see if you can make it violently explode. Get on Mythbusters. Or perhaps The Darwin Awards.)

[dfidler]

Well, I had a look at it and loaded 4 pieces into the back of my Golf.

Absolute Black:
* one 915 x 650 x 40mm; 15mm was taken out of one corner so I need to cut it.
* two 635 x 610 x 40mm; perfect condition, polished on top and 3 corners

Star Black Galaxy (Copper):
* one 480 x 400 x 40mm; it's larger but it's rough cut on 3 sizes; it's stunning.

Total price was 50 quid which isn't that good. He said that I could take as much as I wanted for ~200 quid and, if I'd had a van, I would have paid it.

About 50% of what he had was black, 25% was grey/black and the rest was miscellaneous.

@ArtG - There is a lot of granite there. Quite a lot actually. The 3 ton estimate was just that; I'd say it's more than that, but there you go. Sadly, it's all 'rotting' in the sun/rain with lots of dirt & leaves and huge *** spiders all over it. A few had sink holes and notches cut out of them but the majority were just the left overs from jobs. I didn't see any 20mm stuff there; it was all 30-40mm.

As it turns out, I didn't actually get the piece that I wanted because I would have had to have lifted about a ton of granite off of it to get at it. So I "settled" for the beautiful specimens that I got.

Unfortunately, I don't have any friends that could help me move it all but if I did, I'd seriously consider building a granite rack in my garage and start cutting it into knife blocks for sale on ebay.

There was a piece there that was ~1350 x 900 x 40mm, rough cut on three sizes there in black. Again, there was at least a ton of stone on top of it so I couldn't see if there were any holes in it. I suspect that it was damanged in transit so it would likely need to be sectioned... but if it wasnt... oh god...

Cheers,
Dave.

[dfidler]

And yes, I he really did say that I could have 'the lot' for 200 quid. The problem is, where would I put it and how much weight training would it take for me to be able to lift any of it.

Being practical, I can't take it on my own. But it's such a great deal that I really am considering whether the hernia would be worth that much granite.

[dfidler]

@wbeaty - Granite is the second hardest stone on the planet (next to diamond). I suspect that the accoustics would be pretty awesome, provided that you didn't have massive faces for the speaker (and that you braced it).

I'd imagine that the challenge would be in ensuring that joins wouldn't move. If they did, it would ring like a bell.

On the way home, I had some cardboard between the pieces to prevent scratches (silly as I'm just going to polish them anyways), but i missed a corner. Every time I went over a bump two pieces hit and there was a high pitched "tink" sound but no "ringing". (I sorted it out with a 1" square piece of cardboard under the corner after 10 minutes of cringing at every bump).

Either way, I would imagine that you'd want to epoxy the inside of the enclosure anyways, so that there are a few different mediums that the vibrational energy would have to penetrate. But I suspect that it would sound pretty dead if you did the job right.